NOUSPIQUE - 10 YEARS A BLOG

by David Allan Barker

Part One

About

This is a "best-of" compilation of posts to mark the 10th anniversary of the blog, nouspique.com (with spit for extra shine and boot black in the hair to make it look presentable). The "About" page that you see on most blogs seems like a good way to start a bloggish book. So what is nouspique about?

I guess you could say, at least in 2004, that nouspique was about figuring out what blogging is all about. I followed the learn-by-doing approach. If I was going to understand this emerging medium, then I would have to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty. For my springboard, I used what I was doing at that time. Like many other students who were blogging, I wrote about things I was studying. Since I was studying theology, I wrote about theological concerns. There were two problems with that. One: my writing sounded vaguely academic and no one, not even me, wants to read vaguely academic writing in their spare time. Two: it was theology and, to be blunt, nobody, not even me, cares about theology.

Reverting to a previous interest (once upon a time, I practiced law), I had a brief flirtation with copyright law and its intersection with cultural (mainly literary) concerns. However, there are good bloggers (e.g. Lawrence Lessig, Michael Geist & some of their detractors) who have sewn up that niche. So I reverted to a previous previous interest.

Noting that my interest in copyright wasn't driven so much by an interest in law as by an interest in literature, I found myself writing book reviews, thinking about literary theory, and writing fiction, poetry & essays.

This is when I began to notice a pattern, the thing I can point to when people ask: what is nouspique about? The short answer is this: nouspique is about the power of words. This is my obsession. Although not always obvious, it lurks beneath everything I write. I want to know how words mean. How do they persuade and influence? How do they bring people together and raise them up? How do they corrupt people and tear them down? It's a continuing and, maybe, lifelong investigation.

My concern for the power of words draws a thread through the disciplines I've tinkered with at nouspique. At first, they seem disparate and unrelated. Nevertheless theology, law & literature are all sites of contested meaning where power is at play both in the reading of texts and the way those readings are deployed to affect people in their everyday lives. If we don't take the time to examine how this happens, then people generally (and people without power most especially) become vulnerable in ways they don't even perceive.

Nouspique, then, is an itch on the skin of power, admittedly a minor itch, but useful.

Nouspique aspires to be what citizenship looks like. This last statement comes with a caveat. I write from a Canadian perspective (whatever that means) and, more particularly, as someone who lives in Toronto. In a world that lays claims to a globalized economics and culture, one often gets the impression that the only economics that count are the economics of Wall Street and the only culture that counts is the culture of Los Angeles. There is a place for global perspectives, but not at the expense of the local. That is why, occasionally, I celebrate the particularity of my locale. I don't mean to suggest that my experience is somehow better than yours. Instead, I encourage you to follow my example by claiming the legitimacy of your lived experience in all its particularity.

Housekeeping: Blogs typically appear to the reader in reverse order; the most recent post is the first thing a reader sees. Books typically appear to the reader the other way around, presenting themselves in a historical mode with a beginning and an end. And some books, including this one, throw up their hands at the prospect of a neat temporal linearity and opt, instead, for a themed arrangement. As a result, some of the pieces appearing in this book reference pieces that follow them. I assume that, as intelligent readers, you’ll have no problem synthesizing the non-linear quirks that crop up from time to time.

Copyright: All the pieces in this book were originally published pursuant to a Creative Commons Non-commercial Share-alike Attribution license. However, many epublishers don’t allow for this option. The problem is that once you’ve assigned something to the Creative Commons, you can’t undo it. So, while this ebook claims that I assert my copyright in these writings, as a practical matter, readers are free to reprint them without seeking my permission so long as it’s for non-commercial purposes and their authorship is appropriately attributed.

David Allan Barker

Toronto, 2014

Part Two

How To Read

FULL CATASTROPHE READING

The title for this post comes from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book, Full Catastrophe Living, a landmark piece on mindfulness and the art of living well. Why (I ask myself) can the same principles of mindfulness not also be applied to the art of reading well? Mindfulness is a Western adaptation of Zen Buddhist practice. It seeks to wake people up. Life is richer when we are awake not only to the world around us, but also to the world within us—the world of aches and pains, the world of memories and feelings, the world of that incessant commentary chattering inside our heads. As mindful people, we strive to bring all this to consciousness and then, rather than judge ourselves harshly for it, we acknowledge it with a compassionate self-regard. I contend that we can do the same thing, and with the same benefits, when we approach our reading.

It isn’t a stretch to describe reading as a meditative practice. As we pass our eyes along each line of text, we struggle to maintain focus. We may be tired or worried and find it difficult to let ourselves be drawn into the text. The text itself may be dense and confusing, or the views expressed may trouble us. The writer’s tone may be quarrelsome or the writer’s point of view may be so far from our own that we spend as much time conducting a mental debate with the writer as we spend reading the words before our eyes. We may have forgotten what went before in the development of a complex argument. If we’re reading a work of fiction, we may find ourselves reminded by a character of people in our own lives. We may fantasize about scenarios or even project ourselves into the plot. In reading, the opportunities to stray from the text are limitless.

Full catastrophe reading engages us at different stages in the process of reading.

The text in front of our face

At its most immediate, mindful reading engages us with this text in front of our face. Occasionally, as we read this text in front of our face, each one of us catches the mind drifting from the text, making a mental note of that fact (“Oh damn, there I go again”), and snapping our attention back to this text in front of our face. Our natural inclination is to self-criticism; we chastise ourselves for our lack of focus.

Mindful reading begins with compassionate self-regard. Instead of self-criticism, we acknowledge our wandering mind (our monkey mind) as a neutral fact. We remember that all minds are the same. Even the most disciplined and experienced readers must cope with the monkey mind. We smile at ourselves. And then we do something important: we make a note of where our mind has wandered. This information may prove useful later on.

Stocking our shelves

Yes, we must be mindful of the text in front of our face, but we must be mindful of the texts we choose for our shelves even before we put them in front of our face. How we stock our shelves is as important as how we read our texts. If we stock our shelves according to someone else’s list, then we aren’t acting mindfully; we are surrendering to someone else’s view of what counts as a worthy text. We’re all aware of the BBC’s 100 top novels of all time, and the 1000 books we need to read before we die, and Time’s recent contribution to the list mania. While these lists are useful, a mindful reader will approach them with caution, aware that they reflect specific world views and often homogenous tastes.

Full catastrophe reading demands that the reader throw disparate texts into collision with one another. It demands reading across genres, across cultures, across styles and forms. It demands reading both fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose, drama and scripture. A mindful reader acknowledges the fear of embracing the new, the strange, the unfamiliar, but embraces it all the same. There are benefits to throwing disparate texts into collision. This act of mindful selection mirrors the creative process which, itself, depends upon the collision of disparate ideas. How can we learn anything new, how can we leverage fresh insights, how can we grow, if we limit our reading to the familiar?

From shelves to experience

It is one thing to set disparate books in collision with one another; it is quite another thing to set those disparate books in collision with our personal experience. Imagine the mind map of a person who has read one hundred books. As a mindful reader, she has thrown those books into collision with one another. We could represent this like a road map where the towns represent books and the roads connecting those towns represent the unexpected conversations that pass between those books. If a person has read only in one genre (e.g. they are obsessed with space opera science fiction), all the towns will appear close together on the map and the connecting roads will be easy to travel. But if the person has selected one hundred disparate books, they will appear scattered far and wide, and the roads connecting them will meander past all kinds of scenery.

Now imagine that the mindful reader throws those far flung books into collision with her personal experience—love, loss, work, family, children, illness, aging, marriage, conflict. How much more intricate such a mind map will appear. And, since books are experiences in their own right, how much richer such a reader’s life will be.

Catastrophic reflection

While it may not be appropriate to speak about the purpose of mindful reading (since the purpose is simply to be awake), it may nevertheless be helpful to acknowledge the consequences of mindful reading. I have already noted the compassionate self-regard of full catastrophe reading, but it inevitably follows from such a practice that our compassion becomes other-regarding too. We pause to reflect on these disparate things we have read. What was strange becomes human. We open ourselves up to difference. We feel the experience of others.

When I wrote of the monkey mind, I advised readers to make a note of where the mind has wandered, as this might prove useful. We chastised ourselves for losing focus, but that may have been unwarranted. In fact, the drift to speculation and daydreams may hold in it the seeds of a radical identification, a compassion for the other:

• We pray at midday in a bombed-out mosque in Baghdad.

• We steal a satellite signal for our neighbours in Albania.

• We sneak from Tunis to Spain under cover of night.

• We fight alongside rebels at the mouth of a silver mine in South America.

• We narrowly escape the death squads after Pinochet’s coup.

• We live with the Iroquois as they try to understand these strange Puritans who have settled nearby.

• We ride a raft down the Mississippi with an escaped slave.

• We lash out against white missionaries who try to tell us how to live our lives.

• We resist a totalitarian regime which limits our speech and monitors our thoughts.

Our minds reach out in compassion to the men and women who write such things. In turn, we may be drawn to commit another act of full catastrophe reading—the act of writing for ourselves. Call it full catastrophe writing. We take all we’ve lived and all we’ve read and throw these experiences into collision with one another, then we note the results, giving voice to a radical compassion.

CAMBODIA

Marshall McLuhan summarizes his book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, with: “The theme of this book is not that there is anything good or bad about print but that unconsciousness of the effect of any force is a disaster, especially a force that we have made ourselves.” The paradox of this statement (or its Catch-22) is that a medium functions by carving off and emphasizing one sense over all the others and this has a hypnotic effect that makes it impossible for us to see the effect it produces. So how do we avoid the disaster of living unconscious in the media that wash over us? One way is to explore what people have said at earlier stages in the development of media. And so we have Brian Fawcett, writing in 1986 on the fulcrum between television and internet, to offer guidance on how to think about the media that blind us.

Subtexts are bogus.

Fawcett opens with a brief epigraph in which he challenges the modern assumption that “artistic reality is secured by subtexts that trail in all directions”. He challenges the role of the critic, or even of the academic, as interpreter of these subtexts to the ordinary reader/consumer. At first, the reason for his disdain was obscure to me. But it was apparent that he was drawing on/applying/extending the thinking of McLuhan, so I read The Gutenberg Galaxy and discovered for myself why Fawcett’s disdain might not be so outlandish after all.

McLuhan held nothing but contempt for the idea of the “unconscious” mind.

McLuhan’s theory is that the rise of mass-produced print effected a cultural shift from the audile-tactile of oral societies to the visual of Western Europe, a state of affairs that persisted until 1905 when Einstein announced that space is curved. The shift to print media carved the visual from the other senses. “Since print allowed only a narrow segment of sense to dominate the other senses, the refugees had to discover another home for themselves.” McLuhan describes this refuge as “the ever-mounting slag-heap of rejected awareness.” This is the unconscious, the hidden life of the mind which Freud and Jung “discovered” and interpreted back to the world. However, they discovered what was never lost. In oral cultures, myth—which seems so strange to us now—is strange only because it holds all the senses in awareness simultaneously. There is no unconscious mind except as we have constructed it.

Cambodia as subtext.

Fawcett undertakes to write a book about (post)modern culture which has no subtext. He does this by splitting each page in two. The top half is his text. The bottom half is his subtext, which he uses to make explicit whatever we as readers might think is motivating/driving/informing the top half. The bottom half boils down to a single word: Cambodia. More precisely, that period of Cambodia’s history when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge committed a genocide resulting in as many as two million deaths.

Fawcett’s book asks a single question: how can anybody with artistic aspirations function in a world where there is Cambodia? Had he written his book a generation earlier, he might have called it Germany. Later, he might have called it Bosnia or Rwanda or Sudan or Afghanistan or Syria. He observes: “the continuous growth of authority and bureaucracy is a universal phenomenon of modern political life. But bureaucratic authority has a most unexpected twin: genocide.”

What does it mean to be an author?

The problem with the word “author” is that it is the root of the word “authority” and expresses the danger that wordsmiths may be drawn into the machinery of political authority. There is a paper-thin divide between a love sonnet and propaganda. While we tend to think of authors as practitioners of the liberal arts, the history of literature is illiberally sprinkled with instances of political whiplash. Ezra Pound wrote radio broadcasts for fascist Italy. David Mamet committed a stunning reversal with the publication of The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. And the novelist, Mark Helprin, responded to his loss of internet troll virginity with Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto, which includes numerous statements in much the same spirit as this:

In primary and secondary schools, writing, a naturally individual act, is now taught as such a collaborative exercise. It is often assigned to teams. Students gather and “brainstorm” (a comic-book word) to decide topics and approaches. They submit their work to what are in essence factory-floor soviets, and are bound by every manner of political inhibition and prohibition as if they were composing essays in a luxurious Vietnamese reeducation camp.

Several generations of students have been subjected to this. The preeminence of the collective was drilled into them in their earliest and most impressionable years as surely as they were made to study the same things about Martin Luther King in one grade after another, as if the worst possible fate for a child would be to forget what he had learned about Martin Luther King the year before. Intense “communitarianism” is continued through elementary and secondary education, and then nailed firmly into the wood by experts, ideologues, and lunatics in the university.

As a Canadian blogger, it’s neither here nor there to me, but if I had to guess, I’d say Helprin is a Republican. Doubtless, Fawcett would share Helprin’s abhorrence of the (Cambodian) reeducation camp, but Fawcett might differ to the extent that he sees no distinction between left and right when it comes to wielding authority. In his view, they are equally capable of killing in the name of civilization and progress.

Irony as Procedure.

In effect, Fawcett runs two distinct narrative lines and they vibrate off one another. Sometimes, they vibrate in harmony. Sometimes, they set off a discordant jangle—the jarring tone of irony. The top line reads like reportage, it is familiar, concrete, “low”. The bottom line reads like material in an academic journal, it is formal, abstract, “high”.

On Top.

On top, we have:

• a meditation upon the perspectival fact that a man’s penis looks shorter than it actually is if viewed from above which creates performance issues when trying to urinate in public washrooms;

• a confrontation between Reggie Jackson and a man who demands that Jackson punch him in the face;

• Marshall McLuhan has a chat with St. Paul about how he’s going to promote his messiah (as opposed to all the other messiahs competing for attention);

• a marvellous tale of two Asian-looking German POW’s captured by the English who had lost their way from Tibet fifteen years earlier and had survived because they believed they were dead;

• a development proposal for a facility to house destitute professionals;

• the mysterious disappearance of a bar owner who had blown up the town’s satellite feed because unbridled TV-watching was destroying his business;

and so on.

As Fawcett observes at the end of one account: “Sorry about not having a nice ending, but it’s the world we live in that prevents that. We have all the information and all the sensation, but none of the stories we hear quite add up. They just pile up, a different kind of assault altogether.” Increasingly, that describes our encounters with media. A pile up. An assault.

On Bottom.

Simultaneous with the anecdotal pile up on top, Fawcett offers an extended meditation upon Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge on the bottom of his pages. He is chiefly concerned to tease out all the ways in which the Khmer Rouge sought to destroy memory and imagination. It was never enough simply to kill people.

But he begins his investigation nearly ninety years earlier with another author/authority for whom he feels a great affinity—Joseph Conrad. In 1890, Conrad was sailing to what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo when he saw a French warship shelling the coast for no reason. In the following months, he witnessed the effects of what is possibly the worst genocide in human history. On his return from the DRC, Conrad gave up his romantic plans of life as a merchant marine, and chose, instead, to write in relative isolation. He may have asked himself a question much like Fawcett’s: how does one create art after the Congo?

Although abhorrent, the structure of the Congo genocide is decipherable; it follows the pattern typical of colonialism. A modern power seeks to civilize a primitive culture and wipes out all that it views as backward and tribal. But the situation in Cambodia was different. There, the Khmer Rouge railed against civilizing influences like literacy and education and sought to return the country to its tribal roots. What the two atrocities had in common is that the acts of violence manifested a deeper desire to eliminate a mode of consciousness.

Cambodia and TV.

In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhen theorizes that while the shift from oral culture to print media suppressed the audile-tactile modes of consciousness in favour of the visual, the shift from print to electronic media is well on its way to effecting a shift in the opposite direction. There is a sense in which, like the Khmer Rouge, we are all moving to a tribal consciousness. We all live in Cambodia.

THE GUTENBERG GALAXY

The Gutenberg Galaxy is remarkable as an academic work both because it has wormed its way into popular consciousness and because it has persisted there for half a century. The reason for its popularity is that Marshall McLuhan knew not only how to think about media, but also how to exploit them. He reduced the book’s content to a simple three-word container and shot it like an arrow into popular consciousness: “The Global Village”.

What is The Global Village?

We’ve all heard the phrase. And I suspect most people (myself included) believe they know what it means. Before I read the book, I assumed that the phrase was descriptive: we live in a shrinking world. The proliferation of electronic media and high-speed transportation has changed our perception of the world’s size. We can have conversations with people on the other side of the world and, if we prefer to wait a few hours, we can board airplanes and hold those conversations face-to-face. National boundaries grow increasingly porous. Protectionist trade policies have been dismantled so goods and labour move around the globe unimpeded. The global village is simply the description of an observant man who was trying to understand our changed and changing modes of social and political organization.

But what is it really?

On reading The Gutenberg Galaxy, I discovered that my presuppositions were wrong. Yes, “the global village” can be taken as purely descriptive. But we don’t need a whole book to describe something that is obvious to anyone who’s even nominally conscious. McLuhan means something more by the phrase.

As the title suggests, McLuhan is concerned with a precise moment in Western history—the invention of the printing press. At that moment, Western culture was launched on a journey of transformation from an audile-tactile culture to a predominantly visual culture. Print had existed prior to the invention of the printing press, but its cultural effects were negligible until the printing press introduced mass production to publication. This had a number of consequences including:

• creation of the author (notions like plagiarism, attribution, and moral rights in a text didn’t exist until the Statute of Anne in 1709)

• creation of the individual

• commoditization of text (the very first mass-produced commodity for commercial trade)

• creation of the unconscious (print text emphasized the visual, forcing our other modes of experience and communication to go underground)

• regimentation of linear time (previously, the simultaneity of modes of experience had meant that time was relatively unimportant as a function of media)

McLuhan theorizes that because electronic media reintroduce simultaneity into our communications, and because they restore the audile-tactile to a dominant position, our culture is transforming once again. We have more in common with oral cultures of pre-literate societies than we do with, say, Shakespeare’s Renaissance, or Darwin’s Beagle. We are more like tribal people living in a village, not because our world has shrunk, but because our culture is less visual.

What about the internet?

McLuhan published The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962. While he was well aware of computer technology (which gets some treatment in his book), he could not have predicted what would happen when computers became globally networked (although it has been suggested that he imagined something like the world-wide web). It’s arguable that he coined the term “surfing”. He uses it in a section called “Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave.”

One could point to the graphic user interface and the development of ebook technology to argue that the oral/aural function of electronic media of 1962 was just a blip along a long-term cultural trajectory that prefers the visual. But I’m inclined to think he would regard the media enabled by the internet as synaesthetic. They don’t prefer any sense, but integrate them. (DigiScents even tried to integrate the olfactory sense into the online experience, although PC magazine named it one of the 10 worst technologies ever developed.)

Although it’s possible to apply typographical principles to online design, that doesn’t seem to be the direction we’re taking. Flash was an ideal tool for “forcing” traditional design into the browser space, but that’s pretty much dead. And it seems inevitable that single purpose tablets (aka ereaders) will converge with general purpose tablets. Faber’s T.S. Eliot app integrates tactile, audile & visual, and it provides a model for exploiting new (synaesthetic) media. Online media have also transformed time. Our narratives are now emphatically non-linear. Blogs and Facebook timelines present in reverse chronology, and organic search engines, like Google and Facebook’s soon-to-be-released Graph search, produce search returns that are decontextualized both in space and time.

While book-lovers sometimes deride the blog/tweet/Facebook post/text message/YouTube video/surfing/gaming/Skyping world we’ve created, I don’t think proclaiming it right or wrong, or better or worse, is useful. I prefer McLuhan’s approach which is simply to ask: how far has new media seeped into popular consciousness? By that measure, book-lovers may find themselves in the position of King Canute trying to hold back the tide. Although we may wish that it didn’t wash so far ashore, it serves no purpose to judge the tide.

But is McLuhan right?

I do find one thing rather odd in The Gutenberg Galaxy. The book reads like a “big idea” book. You know the kind. They’re the sort of books Malcolm Gladwell writes. He observes a bunch of fascinating and seemingly unrelated effects, then accounts for them all by relating them to a single unexpected and often minuscule cause. The big idea is that this one phenomenon determines so much in our lives, and we’d never noticed until Gladwell was kind enough to point it out. In a more academic way, that’s what McLuhan does with the printing press. Without it, there could be no psychoanalysis, no Newtonian physics, no nation states, no conception of the individual or of individual liberties. The problem is that this line of reasoning invokes causal relationships that are only possible with a linear conception of time. But that linearity is one of the very things that falls into question here. I’m left wondering if this isn’t a bootstrapping argument (or whatever its opposite). He wants to smash our conception of the hammer by swinging a hammer at it.

THE FUTURE OF THE PAGE

How does one read a book whose fundamental premise is its own demise? It feels a bit like visiting an elderly relation in the old folks home. The conversation is at times awkward, at other times nostalgic and entertaining. After all, when someone (or something) has been around for quite a number of years, it gathers to itself a good collection of tales to tell. But eventually, one asks: is there anything for me to learn from all this talk? In my experience of these situations, the lessons never come from the talk; the talk is just nervous banter to avoid thinking about the inevitable. The valuable lessons happen in the silences; they take their substance from what remains unsaid. In some measure, that is true as well of The Future of the Page, a volume of essays edited by Peter Stoicheff and Andrew Taylor.

These essays took their beginning from a conference held in 2000 at the University of Saskatchewan. The conference and later reflection provided an opportunity for people who make their living by thinking about print media and culture to be intentional in approaching the transition from print to electronic media. As the title suggests, this is not concerned with the book so much as it is with the book’s building block—the page. Historically, the page has emerged as a medium unto itself quite apart from the book, with its peculiar meanings and ideologies, limitations and functions. And it is the page which is the primary unit of information for most of today’s internet users.

Immediately, we confront the first puzzle not directly discussed within the book, but nevertheless obvious the instant we pick it up in our hands. This book is palpable. It is larger than a paperback. It is filled with illustrations. In fact, one chapter is printed on glossy paper. Why a book? Why not a web site? Why not a collection of web pages? The beginnings of an answer emerge from the opening essays which consider an earlier transition from one medium to another—the transition in the 15th century from illuminated manuscript to mass–produced page on a printing press. In some respects, the evolution of the printed page occurred as an organic process, determined perhaps by innate aesthetic preferences and an instinctual approach to our own cognitive needs. But in other respects, the printed page came to reflect the aims of those who controlled the means of production. Early religious and legal texts were licensed exclusively to specific presses, often presses owned by academic institutions like Oxford University. Many of the conventions laid down by early printers, such as those relating to footnotes and marginal inscriptions, persist to this day and have assumed an authoritative force that is difficult to flout. The editors and most of the contributors to this book are likewise from academic institutions and subject to these long–standing expectations. In part, an academic’s performance is measured by publishing history. Tenure and income depend upon it. But it is doubtful (from a university’s point of view) that a paper is truly published if it is available only as electronic text. So if the contributors to The Future of the Page wish to benefit from their contributions, then they have to present their work as something more substantial, in a medium more “real.”

Or it may simply be the case that 500 years of entrenched reading habits have not yet met the right catalyst to undo our literary inertia. The generation which has driven a revolution in the delivery and enjoyment of audio and video is not yet mature enough to have an impact upon the publishing industry. We have yet to witness amongst publishers the same sort of uproar that gripped the RIAA as teenagers around the world began to share audio files through Napster. But the publishing industry’s day may yet arrive. Shortly after this book’s release, Google announced a partnership with several major libraries to scan their collections as fully searchable text. As the use and architecture of the world wide web is increasingly determined by those (younger) people who have been weaned of or have never really felt attached to print media, the publishing industry will have no choice but to adapt. And it will have to begin by reconceptualizing the page. It is in this task that The Future of the Page may prove most valuable.

The essays which are most forward–looking are those considering work which, while still operating within the printed page, pushes the page to its limits. For example, Jerome McGann considers the very problem which Google would present after he had written his essay, by considering whether it even makes sense to produce digital archives of poetry. Because of the way poetry signifies its meaning, much of what counts in poetry appears merely as ‘noise’ in a marked up text of searchable information. What he claims for poetry also applies to most literary fiction. The reason, as he puts it, is that poesis “tends to involve more broadly ‘semiotic’ rather than narrowly ‘linguistic’ materials.” Or, to be more practical about it, Google may be engaged in a monumental waste of time and money if it isn’t prepared to do a little theoretical thinking before it starts mobilizing its scanners.

Perhaps the most effective essay isn’t an essay at all, but more a visual presentation titled “Our Bodies Are Not Final” by Edison del Canto. It plays upon the ancient metaphor that relates the presumed fixity of the text to the solidity of our bodies while drawing a parallel relationship between meaning and soul. The problem with digital media is that it eliminates the solid sense of text and leaves us in doubt of our own embodiment. Ironically, this piece includes the following passage set amongst red and black squares: “Academic expert culture is a culture of command. It secures authority. It achieves command and authority by subjecting you to institutionally legitimated intellectual and sociological power structures. You achieve command by being yourself commanded, and you secure authority by subjecting yourself to institutional authority.” What do words mean when they are disembodied? Allison Muri carries this discussion further as she considers The Visible Human Project. This project involved repeatedly photographing thin cross–sections of male and female cadavers to produce a complete anatomical catalogue of the human body which can now be viewed online as ‘pages.’ She draws an obvious correspondence to the Human Genome Project, which appears to have reduced humanity to text and lends itself well to being indexed and marked up as hypertext. Will we one day be able to do the same thing with our souls, reducing the foundations of our identities to code that can be digitally warehoused and transferred through ethernet? Muri neatly draws in the earlier discussions regarding the shift from illuminated manuscript to printing press. Citing Umberto Eco, she suggests that the shift may have been problematic for the church, not because it involved an adjustment to a new medium, but because the ‘cathedral’ lost some of its authority as gatekeeper of knowledge to an increasingly secular press. In the same way, perhaps our ‘cathedral’ is losing authority. The modern concept of human consciousness or personal identity, as represented by the paper page, is giving way to a ‘secular’ electronic arbiter of knowledge.

Again, in the silence, we find ourselves drawing a conclusion which is not so surprising after all: the challenge we face is not about adjusting to new ways and new ideas; it is about the age–old struggle for power.

WHAT'S A MEMOIR SUPPOSED TO REMEMBER

When I first heard that Oprah Windy was going to interview James Frey, author of the memoir, A Million Little Pieces, that she was angry and felt betrayed because Mr. Frey’s account appeared to deviate significantly from the truth, that she was going to haul him onto the carpet and call him to account in a million little living rooms across America—when I heard all this righteous indignation rising up from the south—I chalked it up to another instance of maudlin-sappy-slightly-self-indulgent-Oprah-strutting. Immediately, a million little reasons came to mind why her indignation should go ignored. But with time for reflection, I found myself reluctantly agreeing. However, instead of calling Mr. Frey to account for a lapse of honesty, I would prefer to question his lapse of authenticity. First, check out a nice summary of the Frey scandal on The Voice of America web site. Mr. Frey’s mendacious tendencies first came to light on The Smoking Gun web site. This has attracted considerable vilification. For example, the blog, The Real Ugly American calls him a “liar fraud and scumbag.”

First, let me be truthful: I have no great love for Oprah Windy’s human-spirit-triumphs-over-every-adversity brand of 19th century Romantic schmaltz. In some respects, it is as dishonest and inauthentic as Mr. Frey. Worse even, for the Oprah shtick commits the added sin of being irrelevant: it tries to dredge up a pastel-hued vision of the world that died more than a century ago.

Now, let me list a million (or at least a handful of) different reasons why we might safely ignore the divine Ms. O:

1. Elsewhere I have detailed the deconstruction of authorship. The author is a distinctively modern creature of western culture who thrives most peculiarly on American soil where individual achievement (e.g. writing books) is valorized over common effort (e.g. creating culture). And yet it is dishonest to heap so much credit upon the author. How much of any book can truly be ascribed to its author? Did the author invent the language? the medium? the form?

2. In the same way, we can deconstruct the notion of a book, or, to lend the project more precision, the notion of a form of book called the memoir. We might say that in the very act of writing our recollections, we commit an act of interpretation which imposes upon the account a rhetorical layer which looks a lot like fiction. We take what was once out there—the facts of the matter—and we draw them inside; we interpret them; we internalize them; and then we set them down. Even writing which purports to be objective—news reporting, like the Wall Street Journal, say, or The Smoking Gun—cannot help but present a gloss upon the facts. We often fail to recognize how far we have strayed from the facts because we share with the authors a view of the world so deeply embedded that we cannot even imagine a position from which an alternate point of view might begin to hold sway in our minds.

3. In connection with the ideal of authorship, I often find myself shouting out “Intentional fallacy!” At such moments, I find myself looking to the text as the sole criterion. I don’t care what the book says, I tell myself; all I care about is how the book says it. Is the writing any good? If James Frey is a good writer, all is forgiven.

4. Where is the harm? Who has been wronged? These are the memoirs of a rogue, a type of the American psyche. Why should we be surprised, then, when he proves to be precisely the character he claims to be—thoroughly untrustworthy?

But perhaps James Frey has done harm after all. The Voice of America article alludes to the harm when quoting Sharon O’Brien, a professor at Dickson College and author of The Family Silver, a memoir about her struggles with depression: “Whether it’s addiction or depression or mental illness, there can be this sense of community, someone’s telling my story, and I feel less alone. The kind of readers he was attracting could have been counting on the truthfulness, because these are often subjects that could be difficult to discuss.” Arthur Frank puts the matter in terms of witnessing. An authentic experience of adversity, whether it be illness or addiction or poverty, seeks to integrate the experience into the fabric of one’s living; it becomes part of one’s identity. The challenge of integration moves in two directions: one seeks to draw experience into one’s self, while at the same time offering one’s self to experience. Integrative living imposes an ethical demand. It is an ethic of service, a regard for the other. It is the look beyond one’s self into a world of need, and then an answer to that need. The ethical demand for an answer to the need of others is what drives the illness narrative, the memoir. The clean and sober ex-addict tells his story, not only to assist in his own therapy, but also as a response to those around him who appear to totter at the brink. He writes to caution them, to support them, to guide them back from the edge. If he seizes the opportunity to do some good, then perhaps there is redemption. Perhaps, then, he can justify his suffering.

But Frey has nothing, just as he gives nothing. Maybe there remains the possibility of redemption. Maybe, one day, he will publish another memoir: the story of a reformed inauthentic man.

Maybe nothing. Maybe Frey and Oprah conspired to manufacture a publishing phenomenon.

SOVIET KITSCH - AN AESTHETIC OF SHIT

I had never heard of Regina Spektor until my daughter asked me for a lift downtown to a concert on Queen’s Quay. I asked who Regina Spektor is and my daughter loaned me a CD called Soviet Kitsch (which has been ranked by New Musical Express as #84 on its list of the top 100 albums of the last decade). It was one of those odd occasions when I encountered something in pop culture without realizing it was a literary reference. Then I read Milan Kundera‘s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and it leapt off the page at me. Of course, as with just about everything else nowadays, I could have made the association if, instead of reading the novel, I had searched  “Soviet Kitsch” on Wikipedia.

According to the author of the wikipedia entry, Kundera uses “Soviet kitsch” as an expression of “the vacuous aesthetics of communism.” Well … maybe, but there’s more to it than that. Here’s the passage from the novel where the phrase occurs. Note, that my translation uses the phrase “Communist kitsch” but that’s probably neither here nor there:

Sabina’s initial inner revolt against Communism was aesthetic rather than ethical in character. What repelled her was not nearly so much the ugliness of the Communist world (ruined castles transformed into cow sheds) as the mask of beauty it tried to wear – in other words, communist kitsch.

However, the preceding chapter makes it clear that Kundera’s concern for kitsch is more general than the aesthetic of a single political ideology. The concern for kitsch has its roots in the book of Genesis and infects all three major western religious traditions and their related political ideologies. Kitsch denies the acceptability of shit or, in its more extreme form, denies the very existence of shit. (For reference purposes, I’ve reproduced the entire passage at the end of this post.)

Quite apart from the simple “vacuous aesthetics of communism,” Kundera’s passage implies other aesthetic considerations:

• although beauty, alongside goodness and truth, is typically understood as a transcendental value, traditional western religious thought is incompatible—even hostile—to the beautiful;

• ironically, religion undermines beauty with another transcendental, goodness, or at least a distortion of goodness which it calls morality;

• communism is a species of religion in the Hebraic tradition, just like Christianity;

• beauty implies shit and may not be able to exist without shit.

I think it’s also fair to suppose that while the presence of shit may be necessary in a work of art, it does not follow that, because a work includes or implies shit, it must therefore be a work of art. Such a work might be nothing more than an uninspired portrayal of shit.

Let’s test Kundera’s observations with some examples:

1. My Sweet Lord. I find Kundera’s definition of kitsch helpful in understanding the holy row that erupted between the Catholic League and sculptor Cosimo Cavallero when the latter unveiled his chocolate Jesus titled “My Sweet Lord” in March, 2007. The Catholic League took exception to Christ’s nudity. It was unacceptable that their Lord and Saviour, the divine Son of God who assumed human form, should nevertheless assume every part of the human form, including the penis and testicles. In Kundera’s terms, the Catholic League would prefer a religious aesthetic of kitsch. I wonder if the Catholic League’s sensibilities were further aggravated by the fact that chocolate is the same colour as shit. (As an aside, Tom Waits’ song, “Chocolate Jesus” provides a fun antidote to kitschy religious philistines.)

2. Kawaii (Japanese Cute Culture). I’ve never understood the appeal of kawaii. In terms of audience, execution, and sensibility it is thoroughly adolescent. As Eleanor Heartney observes: “kawaii seems to serve as a shield against maturity, adult responsibility and sexual desire.”  Its rise to popularity occurred at a time when Japan was reeling from Hiroshima and the dismantling of its military machinery. Unsure how to define itself, some like Yukio Mishima exhorted the Japanese people to return to their traditional values—and committed seppuku to make absolutely certain everyone understood what he meant. Mishima was an artist and three-time Nobel prize nominee who didn’t flinch at the sight of shit and, among other things, produced some of the finest examinations of male (homo)sexuality ever written in any culture (see e.g. Confessions of a Mask). Japanese culture, however, ignored his call and ran in the other direction, preferring to avoid serious self-examination. The secular religion of Japan is now overrun by kitsch.

3. Disney. If kawaii is the heartbeat of Japanese kitsch, then Disney is America’s myocardial infarction. While the rise of kawaii can be traced to a single event, the rise of Disney is a more diffuse account with no single cause. I have my own theory. Disney kitsch is the American dream with half the story left out. Like Kundera’s communism, Disney’s American dream is a religious expression which denies the existence of shit. The denial—the big lie—is that the riches of the American dream are possible without the exploitation of other people and the environment. So, for example, Disney tells Pocahontas (1995) as a love story. Children never learn that Pocahontas was ten when she met John Smith, that they never married, that she married somebody named John Rolfe, that the Jamestown colony probably infected the Powhatan’s with smallpox, that this was the beginning of successive waves of displacement which would drive native Americans to the Pacific and almost complete their extermination three centuries later. The same colonialism-as-kitsch gets played out in The Emperor’s New Groove (2000) and Junglebook (1967).

As a final note, Kundera’s discussion of kitsch poses an interesting problem for artists (like Cosimo Cavallero) who want to engage in serious conversation about issues of kitsch, banality, consumer culture, etc. without succumbing to its art-destroying tendencies. What would a serious treatment of kitsch look like if it were to portray kitschyness in good faith while retaining its aesthetic integrity? Is this even possible? What is Regina Spektor’s album? What is The Unbearable Lightness of Being for that matter?

Kundera on kitsch:

Behind all the European faiths, religious and political, we find the first chapter of Genesis, which tells us that the world was created properly, that human existence is good, and that we are therefore entitled to multiply. Let us call this basic faith a categorical agreement with being.

The fact that until recently the word “shit” appeared in print as s— has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don’t lock yourself in the bathroom!) or we are created in an unacceptable manner.

It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch.

“Kitsch” is a German word born in the middle of the sentimental nineteenth century, and from German it entered all Western languages. Repeated use, however, has obliterated its original metaphysical meaning: kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative sense of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SHIT LIT

If you’ve followed my blog for any time at all, you may have noticed that I have a scatological fetish. Or, to be more prosaic about it, I have a fascination with shit. You can smell traces of it in poems I’ve squeezed out. In stories. In parables. In essays. In criticism. And in literary reflections. I find it heartening, then, to discover others who share my proclivities. In this instance, I direct your attention to Andrew Altschul, who has an essay in The Quarterly Conversation titled “Who Was David Foster Wallace?—The Management of Insignificance: Thoughts on “The Suffering Channel,” Reality, and Shit”. Until I read this essay, I was unaware that DFW had written a story in which shit figured so prominently. His story concerns a Roto Rooter technician who has the “ability to defecate in the form of exquisite works of art”. What I find curious about the essay is that it assumes shit is hostile to art; shit is art’s opposite. I have acclimatized myself to a more European view of shit, adopting Milan Kundera’s position that shit is essential to art; without shit, all that remains is kitsch. Is it possible, I wondered, to reconcile these differing views? Or at least to account for the difference?

My Dog’s Ass:

I should mention that this puzzle first wormed its way into my brain as I was shaving my dog down almost to the skin. You see, my dog has a nasty rash on her ass. The night before last, she kept us up half the night with her ass-licking routine. To relieve the itch, she would bend around and lick herself on the ass and, in a variation of the dog-chasing-its-own-tail routine, she’d circle around and around, clicking her nails on the hardwood flood, then lose her balance and fall over with a whump where she continued to lick her ass while sprawled on the floor.

Yesterday morning, I woke up exhausted and knew I would have to do something decisive. I spent nearly three hours in the afternoon snipping away tufts of hair, brushing out the dog’s coat, then shaving her with the electric clippers. I started at the head, afraid of what I’d find as I moved towards the posterior. My fears were well-founded. Beneath her tail, all the hair had matted. Pulling tufts away from the skin, I snipped and snipped and tried my best to keep the dog in place. The more hair I snipped away, the easier it was to see the source of the problem. A nugget of shit had gotten trapped in the matted hair. Who knows how long it has festered there before it started to irritate the skin? I shuddered to think on it. Instead, I thought on the above-mentioned puzzle, trying to reconcile competing views of shit.

Here’s what I worked out: Kundera and Altschul use different definitions of shit. For Kundera, it’s a case of shit as subject. When he talks about shit, he talks about shit as an integral feature of life, and because all art is a representation of life, shit finds its way into that representation. For Altschul, it’s a case of shit as object. Looking at works of art as objects, he asks the evaluative question: “Is this art? Or is it shit?” As I snipped more tufts of shit-encrusted hair from my dog’s ass, I realized that Kundera and Altschul don’t present competing views of shit. They’re complementary. Using DFW’s “The Suffering Channel” as an example, DFW incorporates shit in his story, satisfying Kundera’s view of shit; but his work is not, in itself, shit, satisfying Altschul’s view of shit.

A parable:

Once there was a man who had a dog. He loved his dog very much, but preferred not to think about the dog’s more fundamental requirements. Whenever the dog shat, he looked the other way, pretending that such things don’t really happen. However, by looking away, he failed to notice the accumulation of shit in the dog’s ass hair. The accumulation of shit irritated that dog’s skin and became so intolerable that the man had no choice but to spend hours with his hands in the dog’s ass to clean things up and give the dog the relief she deserved. The moral of the parable is that when shit happens, you should face it squarely, otherwise karma will find you spending hours with your hands in a dog’s ass.

CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR THEORY (CMT)

How many times have you heard someone say: “But it’s only a metaphor”? While this phrase can crop up in conversations about any discipline, it seems to make itself heard most often in complaints about Christian fundamentalists who have chosen to interpret one or another Biblical text in literal terms. The person making the complaint is typically a self-described liberal who is annoyed that a legalistic interpretation has been applied at the expense of deeper meaning. This is an instance of a broader category of complaint—what we might call the demystifying tendency of postmodern Western culture. It is a critical strategy—maybe deconstruction‘s simple-minded cousin. Like Dorothy, the liberal interpreter draws back the curtain to reveal a man like any other pulling the knobs and levers that create the illusion of a wizard. But note the tone of the complaint, the emphasis on the word “only” which denigrates the concept of metaphor, as if metaphor is a second- or third-class citizen within the realm of verbal communication. The irony of the complaint is that it unwittingly affirms the existence and priority of a literal mode of communication.

In Poetic Logic: The Role of Metaphor in Thought, Language, and Culture (Atwood Publishing, 2004), Marcel Danesi traces the intellectual tradition which delivers to us the prevailing literalist conception of language. At the same time, he reveals the history of a countervailing view which sees metaphorical expression, not as the superfluous accretion to a more fundamental (and literal) mode of speech, but as the outward traces of our mind at work, without which human thought and action would be impossible. Within the last thirty years, the countervailing view has come to be called Conceptual Metaphor Theory or CMT for short.

The “literalist” conception of meaning has its origin in Aristotle who first gave metaphor its name which means (literally?) “to carry beyond.”  You may have noticed that the translation is, itself, metaphorical. There is an apocryphal story that when a student asked Aristotle “What is life?” he replied “Life is a stage.”  Metaphor allowed him to answer the question with extraordinary economy by dropping a shared understanding of theatre into close proximity with the concept he was trying to explain. To our knowledge, this is the first time anybody noticed this “trick” of language. Aristotle tried to explain how metaphor works by suggesting that it follows a proportional logic: A is to B as C is to D. So, for example, if life is a stage (A is to B), then any given instance of life can be equated to the theatre; death can be described as the final curtain (C is to D). For Aristotle, metaphor was a rhetorical device. It’s function was merely to embellish a prior and literal meaning already accessible through language. This has been the dominant view down to the present day.

While Aristotle may have held a neutral view of metaphor, subsequent thinkers tended to denigrate it as an inferior device that got in the way of truth. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke wrote of rhetorical devices as tools “for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment” and where the object of writing is to instruct, rhetorical devices must be avoided because they “cannot but be thought a great fault, either of language or [the] person that makes use of them.”  Similarly, John Hobbes regarded metaphor as a source of ambiguity and obscurity which should be eliminated from philosophical and scientific writing.

Computationalism also contributed to the denigration of metaphor. This is the idea that thought functions according to mathematical models which have precise rules. Leibniz and Descartes were early proponents of this model, and it found fuller expression with Alan Turing who pioneered studies of AI (artificial intelligence). It’s worth noting that computationalism is metaphorical at its root, drawing what is fundamentally an irrational association between machines and the human mind. This observation illustrates why Danesi maintains that the quest for artificial intelligence is pointless. It ignores the irrationality which lies at the heart of both scientific and mathematical thinking. One need only consider the stories which accompany all major scientific and mathematical discoveries to recognizes how the associative power of metaphor is essential to creative advances. Danesi offers the example of Ernest Rutherford who conceptualized atomic structure as a miniature solar system. Another well-known example is the story of how German chemist Kekulé discovered the structure of the benzene molecule after dreaming of a snake biting its own tail.

But perhaps the single most important reason for the continued denigration of metaphor in contemporary thinking is the overwhelming influence of American linguist Noam Chomsky who “went so far as to characterize metaphor as a “deviation” from fundamental linguistic rules.”  While Danesi respects Chomsky’s work, I sense throughout his book a hint of annoyance at the unquestioning deference that is paid to Chomsky. Perhaps Chomsky’s dominance owes less to the persuasiveness of his ideas than to the fact that dominance itself has prevented most of his students from an awareness that other ideas are possible. And yet, as Danesi observes, “literalist theories are virtually useless for understanding semantic systems in their origins.”

There is another strand of thought which Danesi brings to the fore and which deserves serious consideration. He starts with St. Thomas Aquinas who observed that the writers of scripture referred to material things as a way to speak of spiritual truths because that was the only way to make visible the invisible. But the thinker most influential upon Danesi is Neopolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (1688-1744) who coined the term “poetic logic” to indicate that usages like metaphor are intrinsic to thought and cannot be separated from “pared-down” or “bare” speech that gives more immediate access to meaning. Danesi identifies Vico as the first proponent of a psychological theory of metaphor. He writes:

Like Aristotle, Vico saw metaphor as a strategy for explicating or exemplifying an abstract notion such as life. However, he went much further in claiming that the strategy itself resulted from an association of sense between what is unknown and what is familiar. … The association, however, is not just a matter of convenience or expedience. Rather, the two parts of the metaphor suggest each other phenomenologically. In effect, by saying that life is a stage we are also implying that stages are life. The two parts are hardly combined through a mere act of comparison. [italics in original]

While Vico went ignored until the 20th century, other thinkers expressed ideas which would encourage his reappearance. Nietzsche viewed that part of thought which occupies the “domain of conception” as a series of linked sense impressions. In other words, it is highly associative. Unrelated things become related through linguistic forms. Nietzsche makes no distinction between a “bare” speech and a speech that is dressed up in rhetorical tropes. Instead, he chooses to denigrate all speech as inherently unreliable as a vehicle for truth statements.

The next stop on the journey (note the metaphor) is literary theorist I. A. Richards whose 1936 book, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, applies gestalt theory to develop a psychological account of how metaphor works. He argues that metaphor is not merely substitution of a literal meaning for something frilly, but communicates something more, something which Danesi describes as “an entailment based on perception of relationship.”  So, for example, if life is a stage, then the “true” meaning of that phrase does not reside in some literal perception of either life or stage but in the conceptual space where these two words overlap.

This takes us to CMT which emerged in the early eighties. Danesi identifies three major findings of CMT:

1. There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that the literalist approach (that we encode and decode language based on literal meaning) is just plain wrong.

2. Metaphorical meaning is probably our default communication strategy and literal meaning is exceptional (or more likely illusory).

3. Metaphor implies mental imagery, rendering meaning accessible (even to the congenitally blind) in ways that are unavailable through so-called literal language.

Let’s return to my opening harangue against Biblical literalists: “But it’s only a metaphor.”  Applying Danesi’s approach, we discover an inversion in the way we describe competing interpretive strategies. It may be that the people we normally describe as Biblical literalists are, in fact, honouring the metaphorical nature of the writing. At the same time, the people we normally describe as liberals are, in fact, deploying literalist strategies in their approach to language. The problem is: the Biblical literalists honour metaphor at the expense of its relationship to the real world. To take Aristotle’s “life is a stage,” the Biblical literalists start with stage and use it to determine the meaning of life. Liberals tend the skew the balance in the opposite direction. They use literalist strategies to strip metaphorical language of its numinous quality. They start with life and use it to climb onto an empty stage.

I prefer a balanced approach—one which describes itself as neither liberal nor conservative/literalist—one which acknowledges simultaneously 1) the presence of meaning in metaphorical language which is uninterpretable except in its own terms, and 2) the fact that all such meaning must find its ground in the real (literal) world. That places responsibility for the meaning of language, not in the text nor in the world, but in the interpreting mind.

THE IARPA'S METAPHOR PROGRAM

The Atlantic Monthly reports that a tiny secret U.S. intelligence group, the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity (IARPA), has inaugurated The Metaphor Program with the mandate to develop a computer program which can scan large chunks of text and, regardless of the text’s language, generate an evaluation of the author/speaker’s mindset based upon their use of metaphor. IARPA is well-funded and those who tender for research grants under the auspices of The Metaphor Program will share in a purse worth nine figures. (Did you notice my use of a personal accessory metaphor? Clever of me, huh?) IARPA services organizations like the CIA and NSA, so presumably the objective of this project is to enhance U.S. domestic security (rather than expand our knowledge of how we think and communicate). Although the project sounds fascinating, it faces many hurdles, which is my mixed-metaphorical way of saying that it’s the lamest idea I’ve ever heard. It’s right up there with Acoustic Kitty.

Here are some reasons why:

1. Experts don’t agree about what counts as a metaphor.

Metaphor is like art. When we look at visual creations, we have confidence that we know art when we see it. The Mona Lisa is art; graffiti is vandalism. The same holds for verbal creations, and for the same reason. We have been taught what counts as a metaphor, just as we have been taught what counts as art. In high school, we read Catcher In The Rye and understand that Holden Caulfield isn’t really standing in a field of rye grabbing kids as they run past; it’s just a metaphor for an attitude—a desire to protect innocence from the phoney world of adults. Or something like that. In fact, most of the time, we resist the radical equivalency of the metaphor (Thou art Peter, and upon this rock…) and interpose the word “like” between the metaphor and the referent (Thou art Peter, like a rock…). We like to translate our metaphors into similes. I use the word “translate” deliberately. It is the Latinate version of the Hellenistic “metaphor”—to carry across.

We are taught the metaphor as a formal creature:

“O rose, thou art sick!” —Rose as Love.

“Oh happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!” —Riding as Sex.

“Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room” —Cloister as Poem.

But as Michael Rosen points out, our language (every language) is rife with “hidden” metaphors. Metaphors become hidden in two ways:

1) We use them so often that we leap immediately to the meaning without noticing the radical association the metaphor has forced us to make. e.g. “You’re crazy!”  Crazy refers to odd angles, and we apply that figure to describe the mind of someone who is mentally ill. But we have grown so accustomed to the phrase that we ignore the visual image which the word “crazy” suggests and have ascribed the meaning “mentally ill” directly to the word “crazy”.

2) The metaphor is embedded in the word’s etymology and, especially now, with the general demise of classical education, we are no longer aware that the etymology even exists. “Metaphor” itself is an example of a hidden metaphor—its components come from ancient Greek words and express in metaphorical terms a particular theory of language.

Rosen is rightly skeptical that The Metaphor Program will be able to uncover all our hidden metaphors and in all languages. But this first hurdle is compounded (to further mix my metaphors) by the fact that many of our etymological roots are in turn hidden metaphors within their own languages, which pushes us back through the history of language to a time which predates writing. We have been verbal creatures for perhaps 100,000 years; only five percent of that linguistic history has been recorded—less when one considers that many cultures have remained oral cultures even down to modern times. Mapping hidden metaphors becomes an exercise in paleolinguistics, whose most practical application thus far has been to inspire the Anthony Burgess film snippets for Quest For Fire which allowed Rae Dawn Chong to grunt convincingly.

2. How does a metaphor work?

Here are some suggestions. Take your pick.

i) We automatically translate metaphors into similes by supplying the word “like”. Peter is like a rock.

ii) We intuitively apply syllogistic reasoning when we encounter a metaphor. Instead of supplying “like”, we proceed this way:

All rocks are stable and strong.

Peter is a rock.

Therefore Peter is stable and strong.

iii) We make a leap of equivalency in which Peter is both like a rock and is in fact a rock, but we recognize this as a cognitive event in which we see overlapping “pictures” of Peter simultaneously.

iv) Same as iii) but we are religious fanatics who affirm an equivalency between Peter and rocks which is not a cognitive event but an event in the physical world.

v) Same as iii) but we are psychotic. Peter is a rock and we use him as a doorstop.

3. Experts don’t even agree about whether metaphors are important.

In Poetic Logic: The Role of Metaphor in Thought, Language, and Culture, Marcel Danesi identifies two main strands of thought about the role of metaphor in language. The dominant strand is the oldest, stretching back to Aristotle and reasserting itself today in the work of Noam Chomsky. It holds that language has a literal foundation. Words have primary meanings and their referents are easily found in the real world. We know what a horse is even though horses in the real world come in a thousand different varieties  Metaphor is grafted onto this foundation. It is accidental; not essential. When we speak about “a horse of a different colour”, we assume the givenness of the horse. The expression takes the given (literal) meaning as its foundation and adds a fanciful turn of phrase (metaphor). People who follow this strand of thought tend to denigrate the metaphor. For example, the so-called New Atheists adopt this approach and apply it as their primary critique of Biblical literalism, saying: “But it’s only a metaphor.”  In linguistic terms, metaphor is a second-class citizen.

A more recent strand finds its source in the writings of the 18th century Neapolitan philosopher, Giambattista Vico, and it gained renewed interest with the 1980 publication of Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. This has solidified into Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and challenges the “accidental” nature of metaphor, claiming instead that metaphor is integral to the way we think.

IARPA has thrown its hat in with the latter strand (mixing my metaphors again), rejecting the traditional view for which Chomsky is the chief proponent. One wonders if Chomsky’s personal politics influenced this decision. One also wonders at the irony of adopting CMT as a theoretical position to support the development of a metaphor algorithm when CMT holds that the reduction of metaphor analysis to algorithms is impossible; metaphor is fundamentally irrational. (Danesi explicitly addresses this issue.)

4. Metaphors are not an exclusively verbal phenomenon.

Metaphors are a cognitive phenomenon which manifest themselves in our communication. While Western literate societies tend to privilege the verbal, that often blinds us to the importance of other media.

In visual arts, metaphors can be hidden, just as in literary arts. For example, religious art tends to place heaven/angels/Christ “up” in relation to hell/devils/Satan. Or they can be overt. Salvador Dali’s watches scream for us to interpret them as meaning-laden objects which stand in for something else.

In music, we often hear auditory references which stand in for something else. We hear the guillotine drop in Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. We hear snatches of Yankee Doodle in Dvorak’s New World Symphony and “read” them as “America”.

But don’t think that metaphors are creatures only of “high” art. Metaphors are just as pervasive in pop culture. Although it is possible to view the Nike swoosh as an abstract visual design, consumers tend to see it as a check mark or as the motion of a runner leaping from the starting blocks. And in the Fulsome Prison Blues, Johnny Cash doesn’t choose his underlying rhythm because his hand happens to twitch that way; he wants to evoke the sound of a train passing the prison.

It is absurd to suggest that a linguistic analysis, no matter how nuanced, can reveal how a people thinks when much of that thinking isn’t even readable as text.

5. In the hands of the military, description becomes prescription.

IARPA is selling The Metaphor Program in benign terms. It merely seeks to describe the use of metaphor with a view to developing a tool to gauge potential security threats. Description, after all, is the primary role of science. This is a scientific project whose aim is to enlarge our knowledge. Science and knowledge. These are good things. And yet the Atlantic Monthly article cites an example which raises a chilling possibility. It cites a presentation slide offered by The Metaphor Program’s manager, Heather McCallum-Bayliss:

Metaphors shape how people think about complex topics and can influence beliefs. A study presented participants with a report on crime in a city; they were asked how crime should be addressed in the city. The report contained statistics, including crime and murder rates, as well as one of two metaphors, CRIME AS A WILD BEAST or CRIME AS A VIRUS. The participants were influenced by the embedded metaphor…

Look at the first sentence. The words “shape” and “influence”—active verbs—suggest that The Metaphor Program will not stop at mere description any more than The Manhattan Project stopped at abstract nuclear physics.

The shift from the descriptive to the prescriptive happens all the time. For example, economics is the science of collective behaviour, most often human behaviour as measured through the transfer of wealth. But its descriptive function has been co-opted by ideologues who convert descriptions of what is into prescriptions of what ought to be: our markets ought to be unregulated to produce a Darwinian free-for-all in which the fittest economic actors prevail. In the same way, a program to describe the metaphorical use of language seems already to incorporate the aim of manipulating metaphor to produce prescribed outcomes.

Maybe it should describe the word ethics.

The example of economics is instructive. Economists have graduated from mathematically inclined social scientists to politically inclined social engineers who tinker with people’s lives by applying a syncretistic ethic that combines a strange mix of social Darwinism and Benthamite utilitarianism. It sounds as if The Metaphor Program promises something analogous, converting the science of cognitive linguistics into an engine of political propaganda. Or, to say the same thing minus all the big words: it wants to clamp our tongues in a vice and fuck us while we squirm.

6. Metaphor is too organic to prescribe in any event.

There is good news: The Metaphor Project aspires to something impossible.

i) Whatever control power imposes from above, language itself provides the tools to subvert from below. There are countless examples of this. Here just a couple. Earlier I had cited the opening line from a poem in William Blake’s Songs of Experience. Here is another:

A little black thing among the snow,

Crying weep! weep! in notes of woe!

“Where are thy father and mother? say?”—

“They are both gone up to the church to pray.

“Because I was happy upon the heath,

And smiled among the winter’s snow,

They clothed me in the clothes of death,

And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

“And because I am happy and dance and sing,

They think they have done me no injury,

And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King,

Who make up a heaven of our misery.”

In the words, weep! weep!, we hear the chimney sweep’s cry. However, half of the metaphorical association is missing from the poem because it isn’t verbal; it is auditory. Blake’s contemporaries would have recognized in the words “weep! weep!” the cry of “sweep!, sweep!” which chimney sweeps made as they wandered through the streets of London soliciting business. (As an aside: our current image of chimney sweeps is influenced by Disney’s Mary Poppins. In fact, the mortality rate of chimney sweeps was extraordinarily high and, for all the soot in their lungs, could never have danced like Dick Van Dyke. In addition, a sweep of Dick Van Dyke’s age would have purchased child slaves to works as apprentices.)

Another example is Symphony No. 5 by Dmitri Shostakovich. Completed in 1937 during the Stalinist purges, it is widely accepted that Shostakovich embedded in the music elements which ran directly counter to the required purpose of the work. Like Blake’s weep! weep! he spoke with two voices at the same time. Those who listened with the ears of suffering heard suffering, and those who listened with the ears of celebration heard celebration. In this way, Shostakovich could critique the Stalinist regime without losing his life.

Shifting to our own time, one need only browse through the urban dictionary to recognize that the practice of subverting “authoritative” usages through metaphorical euphemism is alive and well. You will see what I mean if you try to compile a list of terms to describe male masturbation.

ii) The Metaphor Project appears to presume that language is acontextual. One would expect this of an American-sponsored project since, as we all know, there is only one English which is American, just as there is only one French which is Parisian, and one Russian, and one Spanish, and one Farsi, and one Chinese.

But would The Metaphor Program capture local usages? Because I live in Toronto, when I hear the phrase “Ford nation”, I hear something different than someone who lives in Detroit, as I do when I hear someone speak of pride. The Basket Weave is a section of highway. We don’t look up when someone mentions Vaughan, even though that township claims to be above us. The red rocket doesn’t blast anywhere (it isn’t even red). The King of Kensington doesn’t wear a crown. And when people say “Gumby Goes to Heaven”, they’re not offering a theological opinion on the fate of a green stop-motion plasticine character. These are ways of speaking that are geographically circumscribed and have local referents.

iii) In terms of context, metaphors can be temporally local just as they can be spatially local. Even as one metaphor is catalogued, a new one sprouts. In New York City, a clothier called Akademiks ran ads on MTA buses with the caption: “Read books, get brain.”  Officials at MTA didn’t know that “get brain” is street slang for getting oral sex. How could they know this? Kids on the street had only just come up with it.

Emergent technologies are fertile ground for new metaphors. People tweet, surf, spam, chat, dump, poke. Screens freeze. Hard drives crash. We download and upload. Our ISP’s choke our bandwidth. Web sites can be forums or rooms. We load them in our browser even though they have addresses but direct us to a landing page. We ping like a submarine, trace like a spy, and log like a ship’s captain. All of these are metaphorical expressions and several of them didn’t exist until we entered the 3rd millennium. The curious thing is that many of these metaphors will lose their currency, and like Blake’s weep! weep!, will become historical artifacts. As PDA’s and tablets rise in prominence, the app will supersede the browser and a new set of metaphors will emerge. Their appearance won’t be imposed by a central authority; they will “bloom” (more like weeds than flowers, but organic nonetheless).

iv) Those who believe in and claim to know the nature of the metaphor are like those who believe in and claim to know the nature of God. They are true believers. I have no doubt that the people at IARPA believe absolutely in the possibility of their undertaking. Like the God of Reverend Phelps, the Metaphor of the IARPA is a Republican. To put the matter more diplomatically, because metaphor is a cognitive phenomenon, and because our attempts to understand metaphor are mediated by this very cognitive phenomenon, we cannot help but interpret it using tools already embedded in our consciousness. The IARPA frames its study using the very tools which are to become the object of its study. The snake swallows its tail. The vacuum sucks itself out of existence.

FEEDING THE TROLLS

I’d wager that virtually everyone of Western European descent remembers listening when they were children to the tale of the Three Billy Goats Gruff. Although Norse in origin, this story of goats and a troll spread far beyond the borders of Norway. It was the medieval equivalent of a viral video. Do you remember how it goes?

The Story

Three brothers want to graze on the other side of a river but must cross a bridge to get there. A troll lives under the bridge, and when the first goat, the youngest and smallest, tries to cross, the troll blocks his path and threatens to eat him. The goat is a crafty creature and tells the troll that his older brother is just behind him. “If you let me pass, then you can have him instead. He’s bigger and has more meat on his bones. He will make a much better meal.”  The troll falls for the ruse and lets the youngest goat pass.

When the second brother appears, the troll blocks his path and makes the same threat. Because the second brother has been texting with the first, he knows what to say: there’s an even bigger brother coming and he has even more meat on his bones. Again, the troll falls for the ruse and lets the second brother pass.

When the third brother appears, the troll makes the same challenge. But this time, the goat is so big that the challenge is laughable. The third brother butts the troll from the bridge and the ugly creature drowns in the river below. Henceforth, the goats are free to come and go as they please.

Modern Trolls

Periodically, trolls make a resurgence in the popular imagination. In the 20th century, J.R.R. Tolkien breathed new life into the troll myth, as did J.K. Rowling in the 21st. Most readers of blogs have done battle with trolls on comment threads and online forums. “Don’t feed the trolls,” our frustrated brethren plead. If we feed these ugly beasts, they will only grow stronger and become more obnoxious. As children, many of us did battle with trolls in the playground when we encountered bullies who threatened to beat us up if we didn’t do as they said. The ensuing exchange would go something like this:

“If you touch me, my big brother will kick your ass.”

“Just let him try. My big brother’s bigger than your big brother and he’ll knock his teeth out.”

“Yeah, well my big brother’s best friend is a black belt and he’ll…”

etc. ad infinitum

What I note about all these modern trolls, from Tolkien to the playground bully, is that none of them lives under a bridge. For me, the bridge is an essential part of the story. It is the means of passage from one domain to another. In the Norse story, it is the route to greener pastures. In symbolic terms, we might view the bridge as the path to change in our lives, and the troll represents all the fears that keep us from fulfilling that change. This is a straight-forward and heart-warming reading of the troll myth. But recently, I’ve had encounters with trolls and bridges that lead me to question both the origins and meaning of the myth.

The first of my encounters was last year when I ventured under the Bathurst Street bridge near Old Fort York and found fire pits, wooden pallets for beds, blankets slung over a fence to dry, cooking utensils, even discarded feminine hygiene products.

The second encounter was under the bridge which spans Rosedale Valley Road where the subway enters Sherbourne Station. I was hunting for graffiti on the concrete walls that are hidden by the dense trees there. I found a couch, an end table, and pallets for beds. As I was taking a photo of a mural, a man emerged from under the bridge. It scared the hell out of me and I ran away.

The third encounter came just two weeks ago. Again, I was hunting for graffiti and ventured under the Wilson Avenue bridge just east of Yonge Street. When I first peered under the bridge, I drew up short, my heart pounding. I thought I saw bodies hanging from the joists and swaying on the breeze. My first impulse was to run away, but I had my dog with me. Whatever happened, my killer poodle would protect me. Because my dog wasn’t spooked by the scene, I paused and took a closer look. When my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw that what I had taken for bodies was, in fact, full-length fireman’s coats hung up to dry. I was visiting someone’s home. They had constructed an elaborate shelter from boxes and green plastic garbage bags.

Rethinking The Story

Could it be that the troll myth warrants a more literal interpretation? If vaguely human creatures can be found under bridges in a modern welfare state like Canada, is it not likely that even more such creatures lurked beneath the bridges of medieval Europe? If we, who spout our liberal platitudes about compassion and solidarity with the marginalized, nevertheless find ourselves struck through the heart with fear and loathing at the sight of a bridge-dweller (I offer myself as a case in point), is it not likely that medieval Europeans, who had no recourse to such platitudes, would simply demonize the ugly creatures? I find it plausible to suppose that such bridge-dwellers were the inspiration for this story.

While I recognize that the term “scapegoat” doesn’t come from this story, I wonder if our billy goats didn’t scapegoat the troll. After a day of satisfying their boundless sense of entitlement with hearty grazing on the far banks of the river, these three boys probably went home to their she-goats and kids and told wild tales of the troll, a dirty wretched homeless person who had approached them, hungry and begging for food. They had done the only thing possible in those circumstances. They had killed the beast. Maybe the goats would conclude with a caution to their kids: they had killed this troll and so, for the time being, they were safe, but there were other trolls. There would always be other trolls. An endless line of them stretching for as far as the eye could see, and all of them clamouring for shelter and food.

The goats might finish their cautionary speech by reminding the kids of words found in the holy herders scripture: “the trolls will always be with us.”  Or worse: “the trolls shall inherit the earth” and the goats couldn’t let that happen!

It’s been a long time since I last read from the holy herders scripture. Remind me again.  What is it that happens to the goats?

MYTHS - FINDING MEANING IN STORY

I learned of the recent death of my grade 9 English teacher, Dan Patterson. I wouldn’t describe him as my favourite teacher; I reserve that distinction for one of my high school crushes (which I shared with most adolescent males in my class)—Jane Sokoloff, also an English teacher. But in terms of influence, Mr. Patterson was at the top of the list along with a handful of others who, oddly enough, all taught me in junior high school.

While I did end up doing my first degree in English, I don’t think Mr. Patterson can be held responsible for that decision. I regard him as influential for another reason. He introduced me to the foundations of everything important in how I think about the world. He introduced me to Shakespeare (Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice); he introduced me to the tricks of rhetorical practice; he introduced me to good novelists like Nevil Shute, John Wyndam and George Orwell; he introduced me to the essay; and he made a fuss over me when I composed an essay that particularly pleased him. And, perhaps most importantly, he introduced me to classical Greek myths along with tales by Ovid. Again, while I have taken the trouble to gain a working knowledge of both Greek and Latin, I don’t think Mr. Patterson can be held responsible for that decision. Nevertheless, he helped establish an imaginative framework that will haunt through all my life.

We tend to be dismissive of ancient stories. Often these tales use a strange and stilted language and feature characters with odd names, and the stories unfold in formulaic ways that jar with our 21st century sensibilities. Sometimes we see no points of intersection with our life today. What concern is it of ours that some long–dead warrior had a bum heel, or that twins were suckled by a she–wolf and went on to found a great city. I think most of us have the same response to the biblical myths. Many of the stories seem impenetrable—a talking snake in a garden, a man getting his hair caught in the branches of a tree, a warrior slaying an army with the jawbone of an ass.

But by the time I was in university, I had begun to cultivate a fascination for these tales, particularly those of a classical ilk. Moving into adulthood, I found myself appropriating some of those tales for myself. Some of them spoke to me across more than 2500 years. You might say that I breathed new life into them dry bones.

Here are a few that have held particular meaning for me:

1. Alexander and the knot of Gordium.

When I was setting up a law practice, my partner and I decided that we needed a logo for our business cards & stationery. We worked with a friend of mine who is a graphic artist, & settled on a design inspired by the story of Alexander in the kingdom of Gordium. After Alexander had entered the kingdom, he appeared in the court of King Gordius. The king presented to him a knot which was reputed to have been so cleverly tied that no one could ever untie it. Alexander contemplated the problem for a little while, then drew his sword and cut the knot in two.

This story offers me a model of how to live my life. Cut to the heart of a problem. No bullshit.

2. Theseus and the labyrinth of Minos.

When the isle of Crete was ruled by king Minos, there was a labyrinth where lived a Minotaur, a creature half man and half bull. No one had ever entered the labyrinth and survived. As part of a tribute to the kingdom of Crete, the Athenians had to provide 7 young men and 7 young women to be fed to the Minotaur every 9 years. Theseus volunteered to go in place of one young man and promised to slay the Minotaur. But before he entered, the king’s daughter, Ariadne, gave him a ball of thread and told him to play out the thread as he went deeper into the maze. For even if he slew the Minotaur, unless he could find his way back to the entrance, he might wander aimlessly through the labyrinth until he died of starvation. Theseus did find the Minotaur and destroyed it, then successfully emerged from the labyrinth.

I take this as a tale about the value of history. To survive, we must remember where we’ve come from.

3. Daedalus and Icarus.

Daedalus, the clever, was the man who had designed the labyrinth for king Minos. To keep him from revealing the secret of the labyrinth, Minos locked him in a tower with his son, Icarus. Daedalus collected the feathers of birds and used them to fashion wings which he and his son could wear in order to escape from the tower. The larger feathers were sewn together, but the smaller feathers were joined to the wings with wax. Before they took flight, Daedalus warned his son not to fly too high. Naturally, Icarus wanted to soar higher, but as he approached the sun, its heat melted the wax and he fell into the sea.

This can be read as an admonition against any number of behaviours—like placing too much faith in science and technology, or like underestimating the power of natural forces.

One of the things I find odd is that we dismiss these meaning–laden tales as the silliness of a primitive culture, yet we are willing to accord absolute authority to similar tales that arose from an equally primitive culture. So, for example, rather than inquire about the meaning of the story about Herod and the slaughter of the innocents, we expend ridiculous sums of money trying to verify the factual accuracy of the story. For me, the value of this story is twofold. First, its sets up a resonant echo with two mosaic tales—the story of Moses placed in the basket as an infant, and the story of the passover. Matthew is signalling that we must read his account in light of the Hebrew scriptures. Second, it is a tale of estrangement. Like the banishment from Eden, and like the Jews carried off to Babylon, a great evil precipitates a separation. In this instance, it is the separation of Jesus from the Jewish people through exile in Egypt. Like the divided identity of Adam and Moses, and all the Jewish people for that matter, this tale signals that Jesus’ apprehension of the world is forever marked by an identification with those in exile. He is for the innocents who suffer.

But this begs an interesting question: where does the story’s meaning reside? The most common (and least helpful) view is that a story’s meaning resides in its correspondence to reality. Hence our obsession with verifying the authenticity of the Turin Shroud and the ossuary of James, brother of Jesus, until we find ourselves financing small armadas of scholars scurrying about like rats on their sinking intellectual ships. Even in the case of fiction, we esteem those works which bear a verisimilitude. The character was “real,” we say, or “true” or “fully realized,” which means that if we didn’t know it was a novel, we might mistake it for biography, whereas it is far more likely that everything we have ever read under the guise of biography is, in fact (so to speak), fiction. After all, a biography isn’t worth reading unless its subject matter was a “character” or “larger than life.”

Another suggestion people make is that a story’s meaning can be discerned by reference to its author’s intention. Although slightly more sophisticated than the “correspondence to reality” notion, it doesn’t get us very far. If people want to know what Christopher Hitchens “really” meant when he wrote his latest book, God Is Not Great, they can interview him and ask him to elaborate. And, as it appears from the spate of clips posted on YouTube, Christopher Hitchens is only too happy to oblige. If pressed, I’m sure he might tell us what he was eating when he wrote a particularly acerbic remark, or what personal disaster in the bedroom motivated the gloomiest of his chapters.

But there are a number of problems with this approach. First, Christopher Hitchens will die. All authors will die. And once dead, they will no longer be available to elaborate upon their writing. Ultimately, all writing must stand (or fall) alone and all the interpretive responsibility finally rests with the reader. Even in the case of my humble blog posts, should someone a hundred or even fifty years from now desire to know what I really meant, they will be SOL since I will be DEAD. The meaning of this post cannot possibly reside solely in my head, any more than the meaning of the book of Matthew resides solely in Matthew’s (thoroughly dead) head, since I nevertheless find meaningful passages in the book of Matthew despite his death and expect (or at least hope) that you can find meaningful passages in my posts with or without my presence on this planet.

A second problem is not so much a problem as an observation. By analogy, God is often styled the author of all creation. However, if the analogy is to hold, then even if we say that God is the author of all creation, and even if we say that God is the author of all our scripture, nevertheless, all the interpretive responsibility still rests with us. One could argue that since God is a living god, that it is possible to “interview” such a god and get an elaboration on what God “really” means in the same way that we can interview Christopher Hitchens for a similar purpose. However, if such a god insists on setting us straight and keeping us from developing our own interpretive capacities, then such a god is, in Freudian terms, extremely anal and emotionally insecure. (This observation applies to Christopher Hitchens as well.)

I would go so far as to suggest that God (or at least God as understood by the authorial analogy) is thoroughly dead. The god of our traditional mythology has a single purpose—to serve as a provisional locus of our meaning. Since that meaning can only ever be located within us as we “read” our world, God is only a living god so long as we apply our minds in the act of seeking meaning. I don’t think this is a reductive view of God—just different.

And I find it amazing that the journey which takes me to this point had its beginning in a grade 9 English class with Dan Patterson’s introduction to mythology.

Part Three

How To Write

WRINGING THE AUTHOR OUT OF MIDDLE CLASS FICTION

In the introduction to Otherwise Known As The Human Condition, Geoff Dyer writes of how he first broached the idea of an essay collection with his editor:

[H]e asked if these pieces would be linked, if there might be some way of passing off these bits and bobs as a coherent book organized around a defining theme. Would it be possible, for example, to compile a book of my writings about photography? Or American writers?

Possible, yes, but, from my point of view, not at all desirable because it was, precisely, the unruly range of my concerns that I was keen to see represented in a single volume.

…

It seemed to me that this variegation might even give the collection a kind of unity of coherence. The more varied the pieces, I argued, the more obviously they needed to be seen together as the work of one person—because the only thing they had in common was that they were by that person.

I find Dyer’s words heartening given that I regularly break the first rule of blogging by resolutely refusing to embrace a unifying theme. While some people blog about poetry or celebrities or being gay or being a mom, I claim to blog about “the power of words” and use that catch-all as license to rant about atonement theology and copyright reform and Stephen Harper’s political leanings. I trust that because all my opinions share the same DNA, their relatedness will be obvious even if my brain fails to give them a sense of unity.

The curious thing about Dyer’s introduction is that it feels like it belongs to another era. Although Barthes quietly proclaimed the death of the author more than 40 years ago, the sudden rise of the ebook is moving people to shout this news from the mountaintop. Blogging pranks, ehoaxes and spam ebooks have produced a reversal of our natural presumption. Instead of giving authorship the benefit of the doubt, we assume that a written work has been manufactured by a process—that there is no “real” person behind the author. Dorothy pulls away the curtain, and instead of finding a man posing as a wizard, she finds an app, or a corporation, or a marketing firm. Dyer’s unifying author sounds like a quaint artifact from an earlier time.

This has been compounded by online lit journals, like >killauthor, which deliberately promote this reversal of presumption, and by advocates of the transmedia novel who see the ebook as a temporary expedient bridging the gap between traditional print and a brave new immersive literary experience. The challenge of the transmedia novel, like the Hollywood film, is that it cannot be the product of a solitary person scribbling on a pad or banging on a keyboard; it requires legions of disparate talents collaborating to create a single work. Faber’s Wasteland app is just a toe-dip in the shallow end of a gigantic pool.

To mark the first anniversary of the Toronto G20 Summit, I asked whether a novel about that event might be disingenuous since the novel, as traditional publishing has produced it, is very much a creature of the middle class (and Toronto’s middle class was very much complicit with the ills of that event). Part of what makes the novel a creature of the middle class is the way in which traditional publishing produces the author. The interview, the book tour, the readings, the signings, the stories of drinking, of acerbic witticisms, the tales that grow into legends that grow into myths. After 40 years, one becomes Margaret Atwood. But in the age of social media, one must go one further: author must become brand. Again, one becomes Margaret Atwood with her bazillion followers on Twitter. The answer to the middle class novel, I suggested, was to allow the conventions of the novel to disintegrate. Do it as an act of protest. Why not begin by disintegrating the convention of the branded author?

One way to undermine the convention of the branded author is to rejig the authorial voice, itself a creature of traditional publishing. There is a myth that a successful author needs a strong and distinctive voice. It’s a self-fulfilling myth, of course, since what determines success is tautologically defined. (That’s a really arcane joke, btw.)  There are plenty of examples of writing that illustrate why the myth of the strong authorial voice is just that—a myth, and like every other myth in the internet age, it may safely be thrown in the garbage.

I’ve just finished two books, both from Dzanc, which illustrate alternative approaches (call them anti-approaches) to the authorial voice. They are Asunder, by Robert Lopez, and The Girl With Brown Fur, by Stacey Levine. Let’s adopt the presumption of former times and say that these authors are real people.

Both books are collections of short stories. That’s not a coincidence. If you’re writing against the grain of the middle class novel, the obvious starting place is to stop writing novels. Write short pieces instead. Write for the internet attention span. Almost by necessity, a collection of short stories forces the reader into a world of shifting characters and narrative voices.

In Asunder, Lopez writes most of his stories as first-person narrative—or anti-narrative, as the case may be. “I” rarely has a name much less a history. “I” feels disembodied, a floating eye that drifts over the landscape, a being in the middle of a dissociative episode. The title story “Asunder” takes the “I” to its most generic, calling the narrator “someone in particular”. This is actually kind of funny. Feel free to laugh. Here is an excerpt from the story:

THIS IS TO BE WITHOUT CEREMONY.

This is to be the marriage of disparate ideas.

Concerning someone in particular and the kind of woman who signs the guest book at her own son’s wake. On the surface it’s complicated. Deeper down it has to do with something else altogether.

Someone in particular wanted to compose a story without characters and details. Without a setting. No themes, no ambiguities. Being that someone in particular doesn’t consider himself a writer he feels he can dispense with many rules and regulations.

And then the kind of woman that takes twenty-five pills a day.

No flashbacks, no dialogue, no obscure academic references.

What’s more is someone in particular is shamefully ignorant when it comes to the rules and regulations. For instance, he has no idea what a split infinitive is.

And then the kind of woman who sends her twelve-year-old grandson a birthday card with a five dollar bill taped to it and writes I am broke under her signature.

Any use of simile or metaphor or foreshadowing or alliteration or onomatopoeia would be unnecessary in such a story. Nothing at all synecdochical.

Even if someone in particular knew what any of that meant.

If you are on the NYT Bestseller list for fiction, be advised that Lopez is poking gentle fun at you. And you deserve it.

Let me mention one more story for good measure. It’s called “The Allergies” and is all of 365 words long. Once upon a time, “I” had all the usual middle class stuff—job, gadgets, car. “Now my life is dry toast for breakfast and the allergies.” Because of the allergies, “I” never goes out anymore. I (your blogging voice) read this story almost as a parable of my own life in the world of arts and letters. Once, I did what normal people do, reading lovely novels about ordinary people who confront great obstacles, dig deep, find untapped moral reserves, rise up, overcome, apotheosis, redemption, yada, yada, yada. But I developed an allergy and now the only books I can bear to read are books whose characters and settings are covered in tin foil.

In The Girl With Brown Fur, Stacey Levine offers a similar detachment. Her first story, “Uppsala”, opens with generic characters which, like those in “Asunder”, push against our assumptions about how readers should engage with the writing.

We come from a bad family and we are disgraced.

“What time do we get there?” asks Brother.

“Stop cluttering your mind with those kinds of thoughts,” answers Mother. It is Brother’s nineteenth birthday, and we are driving off to the cabin.

One thing is certain: this sure as hell ain’t Celie from The Color Purple. We aren’t invited into a close identification with characters. The fictionalness of the fiction is on display. It’s like we’ve stepped into a house without any drywall or finishing carpentry just so the builder can remind us of how faux the finishing really is.

Since I mentioned a parable from Asunder, it seems only fair to mention a parable from Levine’s book too. I find myself drawn to the story titled “Sausage” which I read as a parable of contemporary commercial writing (although, in fairness, it could be read more generally as a parable of any commercial production, or even and perhaps especially of religion). The narrator works in a factory pedalling an upside down bicycle machine that cranks out sausages. Mysteriously, the sausage factory is located in “France” with quotation marks. There is a warder who supervises sausage production. The sausage maker decides to take the misdeeds of a former, but now dead, sausage maker. It will be an act of atonement which gives the sausage maker a measure of freedom. However, management sees through the ruse: all the sausage maker wants to do is to use the act of atonement to purchase indulgences. The sausage maker isn’t really devoted to the trade of sausage making. The sausage maker sneaks sleeping pills in order to escape from the body. A new sausage-making tax is introduced which will soon be extended to the means of production. Due to global pressures, the work day will be eliminated …

I read sausage making as a stand-in for any creative process—like writing a novel—which has been wrenched from its organic roots and thrown onto the factory floor. The sausage maker concludes with the questions: “In the next decade, who will I be? Will we keep our gains?”  Those are questions on every author’s lips nowadays.

STORYTELLING AS SUBVERSION

What is it about storytelling that turns the storyteller into a threatening figure for those who hold power? That is the case for Wole Soyinka, playwright, novelist, poet and Nobel laureate, who spent most of a 27 month prison term in solitary confinement. That was in 1967 at the beginning of the Nigerian civil war when Soyinka was accused of helping to buy jet fighters for Biafra. He was never formally charged. That was not the first time he had been imprisoned by Nigerian authorities.

Did the storytelling impulse turn Soyinka to political activism? Did the activism impulse turn Soyinka to storytelling? Was there some prior impulse—a genetic predisposition, say, or a bolt of lightning—which motivated both the storytelling and the activism? Or did the two feed one another in a kind of carbon cycle of the soul?

If we say that storytelling can turn storytellers into activists, then it’s easy to see why a government might feel threatened by a storyteller. But what about the act of storytelling itself? Is there something intrinsic to storytelling that renders it subversive?

Climate of Fear

This is a question which occurred to me as I read Soyinka’s Climate of Fear (while I was waiting to be screened by security at an American airport). It is a collection of five lectures which he delivered in 2004 for the Reith Lectures, the BBC’s equivalent of our Massey Lecture Series. Soyinka himself never poses this question, but it seems an obvious query to put to a man for whom such intellectual discursive analytical stuff is about as far as one can get from the writing for which he is best known.

I have a theory and wish to test it here: storytellers—at least those at the top of their form—are threatening figures precisely because they refuse to be intellectual, discursive, analytical.

The Monologue

Climate of Fear offers an exegesis of power relationships within the political sphere. One feature of power which Soyinka observes is the monologue—the one-way rhetoric of domination that sounds from both the left (with the Marxist chant “Property is theft” ringing above the Paris student riots of 1968) and the right (with George W. Bush’s “Weapons of Mass Destruction” whipping an entire nation into a blood lust that bore no connection to the events of 9/11) and culminating today in the phrase “There are no innocents” which is invoked to justify the slaughter of children as collateral damage to military action. Power, he observes, exists on an axis with dignity, and while we might tend to regard dignity as a lesser value than, say, life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness, nevertheless, Soyinka draws dignity to the centre of the conversation. Power invariably comes at the expense of dignity. The monologue itself is an exercise of power and so becomes an affront to human dignity.

Persuasion

I think this is where my theory intersects with Soyinka’s account. The intellectual, the discursive, the analytical are strategies aimed at persuasion. Implicit in the act of persuasion is the notion that “I am right; you are wrong.”  Interesting that we speak of a person’s intellectual or analytical powers. Persuasion can be a violent act. While we in Western countries pride ourselves on the spaces we have created for “civil discourse,” there are times when the discourse of our Parliamentarians, for example, is anything but civil. Sometimes our discourse devolves into unabashed attempts to strip those who oppose us of their dignity. Then, we deal in humiliation.

Storytelling subverts power when it eschews persuasion. A story that embraces ambiguity, that acknowledges complexity and admits multivalent readings is a story which confers dignity on the reader. It grants to the reader the freedom to discover for herself what meanings may lie within this narrative space the author has birthed. An intrusive author reveals insecurity in his artistic powers.

Religious Persuasion

In an early chapter, Soyinka asks why, during the Vietnam War, nobody tried to draw the whole world into the conflict by, say flying airplanes into buildings in New York City or by blowing up trains in Spain. He tacitly answers this question in the final chapter, titled “I am right; you are dead,” by observing that the Vietnam War concerned a secular ideology. There is a qualitative difference between communist fanatics and religious fanatics. Secular ideologies are grounded in reason, and so will come up against facts that cannot be refuted. The collapse of the Soviet Union is one such fact. But religious ideologies are grounded in an all-knowing, all-seeing, invisible being whose existence is impossible to refute. As a consequence, there is no reason to suppose that such an ideology’s monologue won’t go on forever, no matter how vile.

There is an analogous distinction between the secular persuasion of the academic, which claims an objective and therefore universal point of view and seeks to allow truth to reveal itself on its own terms, and the religious persuasion of the cleric, which claims a subjective (god being the subject) although equally universal point of view and seeks to convert the listener to the truth already embedded in that point of view. In both instances of persuasion, there is the danger that that act of persuasion will be used to assert dominance in a power relationship (but that is easier to counter in the case of an academic).

Storytelling can serve to inoculate us against the poisonous impulse to dominate by offering alternatives to the monologues of persuasion and conversion. Stories can erase power from the author/reader (teller/listener) relationship when they speak to us with compassion and empathy, humour and insight, humility and longing, and with respect for that most elusive of qualities: our innate love of beauty.

COMING OUT AS AN AUTHOR

I did an English degree in the 80′s. Or it did me. I don’t know which. This was the age of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. Alex Keaton wore ties to the dinner table and poked fun at his hippie parents. I had thought I might go on with studies in literature or classics, but felt the conservative wave wash over me, so I went to law school instead. There, I found the lecture halls teeming with artists, musicians, and poets who, like me, had succumbed to this ineluctable drift to the right. If we went to the movies, it was only to hear Gordon Gekko tell us that greed is good. And if we read novels, it was only so we could fantasize with Tom Wolfe about being a “master of the universe”.

I suppressed my urges. I bought a brief case and wore preppy clothes. I ate sushi for lunch. And whenever I felt in myself the desire to read a novel or to write a poem, I submitted to the discipline of a chapter from Oosterhoff on Trusts. Be strong, I told myself. Don’t lapse. But people like me always lapse. Sooner or later there’s a chance encounter in a bathroom stall or in the back pew of a church. For me, the lapse came in the Bora Laskin Law Library in a remote corner on the second floor. I hid in a carrel by a west-facing window and there, in the pinkish hues of the setting sun, I leafed through back issues of the Texas Law Review, engrossed in the “Law As Literature” exchange between Ronald Dworkin and Stanley Fish. It was as if a whole new world had revealed itself to me. To think! Legal minds could openly display literary thoughts!

Not long afterwards, I discovered that my Torts professor liked to relax with the works of Plato—in the original Greek no less. My Intellectual Property prof had a thing for sampled music. My International Law prof devoted an entire lecture to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. And my Labour Law prof channeled Jacques Derrida as he deconstructed the Ontario Labour Relations Act. I had felt so alone. It was a comfort to know there were others like me.

It was a comfort, yes, but it would be years before I acted on my desires. I had internalized a lifetime of social expectations about what a man like me is entitled to want. These expectations had wormed their way deep inside, like a spirochete in the brain, until they had subverted my very sense of entitlement. I fully believed that the best I could do for myself after graduating from law school was to buy a big house, marry a trophy wife, and park a Porsche in the driveway. It would be years before I discovered that I could have so much more. And it would be even more years before I could give myself permission to pursue that more.

I am an author. There! I’m out. You may already have suspected as much. You may already have read the signs. For years now, I have been acting out in subtle ways. You may have caught me reading David Foster Wallace or writing cryptic hints into my blog posts. I feel so relieved to be out now.

An author is not the same thing as a writer. A writer has a job or a profession or a calling. An author is an identity. A writer produces himself through what he does; an author, through what he is. A writer chooses to write; and author is born that way. You can try to change an author—and many have tried—by forcing him to read Oosterhoff on Trusts or the Tax Act, but that will only leave you with a twisted shell of a man whose first act on waking each morning is to tell himself a lie. The fact is: authors are incurable. The attempt to cure destroys the man.

I have spent years trying to pass. “What do you do?” they ask. And I offer an answer which I believe will satisfy their expectations for someone like me. I do my best not to raise suspicions. What I fear most are conversations that go like this:

“An author? Oh really. Nabokov was an author. He wrote Lolita, you know. About a pervert. Are you a pervert?”

Or

“The only authors with any credibility are the ones who kill themselves, like Hemingway and Woolf. Do you own a shotgun?”

But mostly I fear the accusation (which I read in so many looks) that I am a parasite, a person who makes no contribution to the social good. As the world turns, we revisit those days of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher where the only good is the economic good and the only measure of that economic good is the wealth it produces. Such language has no value in conversations about identity. It is tempting to return squeamishly to my closet.

And then something marvellous happens—a chance sighting of my name online. I’m scrolling through the comments following an article in The Guardian and I stumble upon one which begins: “As author David Allan Barker observes…”  Sometimes we need the opinions of others to affirm for us our identity. The closet is a lonely place.

My name is David Allan Barker. I am an author. I am loud. I am proud. And, as an economic player in this crazy world of ours, I remain utterly and defiantly useless.

UNWANTED ERECTIONS AND ADOLESCENT WRITING

Writing stories is not a recent obsession for me. It began in my early teens with a story about the end of the world. Planet Earth gets sucked into a black hole. Balls and holes. The scientist who announces Earth’s fate to his colleagues does so while standing beside a pool table holding a cue stick. This was so obviously a story by a teenaged boy sublimating his sexual urges. It was me using my pen to masturbate. Amazing Stories sent me a form rejection with a tick mark beside one of the cardinal rules of sci-fi storytelling: an idea alone does not a story make. Discouraged, I abandoned sci-fi stories for a time and moved on to more adult themes. I wrote a story about a married man who picked up a woman at a bar. As they drove to the local motel, a fog rolled in, forcing them to stop. Bored of waiting for the fog to lift, they succumbed to the inevitable. Blouse unbuttoned, pants around ankles, car seat tilted back as far as it would go. Mid-coitus, they felt a rumbling and realized too late that they had stopped on a level rail crossing. Smush! I called my story “The Well-Trained Husband.”

I gave the story to my mom for her opinion. I’m not sure what I expected from her. My mom’s literary education was typical of native Ontarians who grew up in farm communities: a handful of canonical texts run through the blender of a healthy Calvinism. It produced a philosophy of art that could be summarized like this: the purpose of art is to improve the character; if it doesn’t do that, then it’s crap. Until grade 8, my mom attended a one-room school house on the 5th concession south of London. For all that time, she had only one teacher, a woman named Katie McCorquodale, a good Presbyterian like my mom. I had the privilege of meeting a much older Mrs. McCorquodale at various community functions. Doubtless, she was a woman of unassailable character, but she was no artist, that’s for goddamned sure. After my mom read my story, she looked me in the eye and said, “It’s not terribly moral, is it?”

Getting a form rejection slip from Amazing Stories is one thing; getting a steely gaze from your mom is a rejection of a different order. Although I was too young to have discovered therapy, I did a good job of talking myself through the crisis. I started by asking myself why my mom couldn’t see the camp, the over-the-top silliness of a train bearing down on lovers in a fog-bound car. Why were our sensibilities so different? Part of it may have to do with personality. Part of it may also have to do with the obvious fact that after they were married, my parents moved from the corner of nowhere and cornfield to an apartment that fronted the busiest street in the country. Of course I would grow up seeing the world differently; I was a city boy. Until me, no one in either of my parent’s families had ever been born and raised in a city. I was a dreadful experiment, like the monster in Frankenstein.

For my next story, I wrote about a husband and wife who rented a house with a long narrow staircase to the bedroom and bath. The husband had been in an accident and was confined to a wheelchair. The couple hoped one day to save enough for a proper escalator, but in the meantime, the husband hoisted himself up and down the stairs step by step, grunt by grunt. Although, technically, he still had the use of his manly bits, since the accident, he’d never been able to get an erection. The wife loved her husband dearly but was sexually frustrated and longed for more than he could give her. So they came to an agreement, a temporary measure until the husband solved his problem. Once a week, while the husband was at work, the wife would remain at home and entertain the services of a gigolo. My story opens on the morning of a weekly visit from the gigolo. The husband feigns illness and says he has to stay home. The wife suspects that the husband is lying. She is angry, but relents; he can stay home while the gigolo visits, but must promise to stay downstairs. Story promises are made to be broken, and while the wife and her lover-for-hire scream their orgasms like butterflies down to the sitting room, the husband begins his arduous grunting journey up the stairs. At the top, he hoists himself into his wheelchair and waits for the couple to finish. Confrontation between husband and gigolo. Husband produces gun. Gigolo laughs. Husband fires. Misses. Kills wife. Recoil sends wheelchair down the stairs. Bump, bump, bump to the bottom where the chair flips over. Husband breaks neck and dies. Gigolo stuffs giant manly bits back into pants and traipses downstairs. Spooked by husband’s leering dead eyes, gigolo covers them with comics page from newspaper.

The end.

I never showed this story to my mom. I showed it to my friend’s mom instead. She seemed more liberal in her view of the arts. Once a week, she took her son to drawing classes. Once a week, my friend and his mom would sit together and draw female nudes. When I heard about this, I wanted to trade places with my friend. I wanted to be the one who sat holding a pencil and staring at naked women. Besides, my friend was gay so the experience was wasted on him. Then again, maybe it was for the best that I didn’t go to the drawing classes. As a horny teenager, it was reasonably certain that the minute the model’s clothes came off, I’d get a massive erection. In an art studio, I wouldn’t know what to do with an erection. I’ve only ever had one sure-fire method for dealing with an unwanted erection.

I write.

I write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write.

CAN ALCOHOL MAKE YOU A BETTER WRITER

More than a decade ago, it came as a great blow to me when my doctor phoned with the results of a biopsy. I had celiac disease. No more gluten. So what foods have gluten in them? I asked.

Well, the doctor said, bread for one. Anything with wheat in it. No pasta. No pizza. No beer.

No beer? But I’m Canadian. I can’t live without beer. I mean, there’s Molsons and Labatts, but there’s all those craft breweries too. There’s Upper Canada Lager, Sleeman’s, Creemore, Mill Street.

What the hell am I gonna do? I almost cried.

The doctor shrugged. He had no idea. His only suggestion was to stick to hard liquor. Never in a million years would I have expected a doctor to recommend that I drink Scotch. But there it was. I should have asked for it on a prescription pad. I should have billed my Laphraoig to my health plan.

I’m not an egregious drinker. Sometimes—like now for instance—I like to sit in front of my computer monitor and plunk away at my keyboard while enjoying a can of Nickel Brook Gluten Free Beer brewed just down the road in Burlington. It loosens my fingers. It relaxes my brain.

Do you think I exaggerate the effects of a good drink? Does it sound like I’m trying to rationalize a bad habit? Lately I’ve noticed a number of online snippets that seem to confirm my view: a drink helps things along.

For example, I noticed a tweet from a writer I follow on twitter. On April 22nd, 2012, he said: “I enjoy poetry most when I’m drunk.” Admittedly, he’s talking about the appreciation of poetry rather than its creation. But that’s a fine distinction.

A week later, another person on Twitter posted an image of a P.P.S. from a letter by Ernest Hemingway which reads as follows:

P.P.S. Don’t you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well being that rum does? I would as soon not eat at night as not to have red wine and water. The only time it isn’t good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief. Let me know if my books make any money and I will come to Moscow and we will find somebody that drinks and drink my royalties up to end the mechanical oppression.

Hemingway, of course, was an egregious drinker. To be fair, he doesn’t appear to say that you should drink while writing, but should drink all around your writing.

It’s easy to come up with a list of great writers whose writing is drenched in alcohol. Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano is an extended conversation with the inebriated brain. F. Scott Fitzgerald was, in his day, renowned as much for his alcoholism as for his writing. Closer to home, we have Morley Callaghan, who sometimes drank himself into oblivion with Hemingway when the two were working together in Toronto. Dorothy Parker is famous for saying: “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” And since we’ve mentioned Hemingway, it seems only fair we mention his ex, the inimitable Martha Gellhorn. In his introduction to her Travels With Myself And Another, Bill Buford calls her a “boozy reporter of wars” and says that she tutored him “on matters of the heart, and on drinking (you could never drink enough).” She had a cottage in north Wales “where she lived alone, drank booze, read mystery novels, and wrote.” Despite her questionable habits, she lived to the ripe age of eighty-nine.

Not everyone thinks alcohol is conducive to good writing. Take, for example, Katha Pollitt’s eulogy of Christopher Hitchens in The Nation. She invites readers to remove their rose-coloured glasses and take a more honest look at the man:

His drinking was not something to admire, and it was not a charming foible. Maybe sometimes it made him warm and expansive, but I never saw that side of it. What I saw was that drinking made him angry and combative and bullying … Drinking didn’t make him a better writer either—that’s another myth. Christopher was such a practiced hand, with a style that was so patented, so integrally an expression of his personality, he was so sure he was right about whatever the subject, he could meet his deadlines even when he was totally sozzled. But those passages of pointless linguistic pirouetting? The arguments that don’t track if you look beneath the bravura phrasing? Forgive the cliché: that was the booze talking.

But a recent study from the University of Illinois and published in the journal, Consciousness and Cognition, suggests that alcohol may improve creative problem solving. In a study, subjects who had two drinks performed better than people who had nothing to drink. As one would expect, subjects who were “sozzled” couldn’t perform at all. The conclusion: a moderate amount of alcohol may enhance certain tasks involving creative thinking.

It may be that the disinhibiting effect of alcohol encourages what Edward de Bono would describe as lateral thinking. This is precisely the kind of thinking that is the stock-in-trade of a good writer.

The problem, of course, is that alcohol is an addictive substance and a CNS depressant. There may be a strong correlation between Hemingway’s alcohol consumption, his good writing, and the fact that he put a shotgun in his mouth and blew his brains out.

As I stated above, I’m not an egregious drinker; I’m not even a modest drinker, so I can’t say from personal experience whether there is a connection between alcohol and creative output. But I do have an analogous experience—severe depression. Years ago, I ended up in a heated debate with my then psychiatrist. I had been in rough shape. I remember sitting in his office a few weeks after discharge from a hospital and he said something like: “Your writing is fine and all that, but trust me, your writing would be so much better if you could achieve some measure of happiness in your life.” I didn’t believe him. Even now, I think he was dead wrong.

Although severe depression (and its treatments, like meds and ECTs) can cause cognitive impairment, the experience has a disinhibiting effect that is a lot like being drunk. Your judgment is impaired. You’re overcome by feelings of dysphoria. You can hardly tell what’s real anymore. Being suicidal can liberate your writing. If you’re willing to jump off a bridge, then you and your ego have pretty much parted company. You feel you have nothing to lose. You no longer care what other people think of you. If you’re willing to jump off a bridge, then you’re willing to take other kinds of risks too. Applied to writing, you’re willing to take the kinds of risks that make your words crackle with a detached honesty.

Although I disagreed with him, my psychiatrist was right in the ultimate sense. Your writing isn’t very good if you’re dead. Hemingway’s output was severely curtailed by his suicide, as it was for Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Jerzy Kosinski, David Foster Wallace, Hunter S. Thompson, Yukio Mishima, Arthur Koestler, Anne Sexton, Hart Crane, Primo Levi, and countless others.

Is there a way writers can enjoy the disinhibiting effect of alcohol or the detachment of severe depression without the adverse consequences?

One possibility is play.

Treat writing as play.

I think it’s fair to say that most of the best writing comes from people who never grow up. It’s not simply that play offers a fantasy world that generates good stories; but also that it happens in an unselfconscious state of mind. When we play, we don’t care what other people think of us. Play lets us take the kinds of risks that make our writing better.

How do we, as grown-ups, recover the world of play? I have no answer for that question. Maybe it starts by cracking open a fresh bottle …

PUBLISHING IS RELIGION

It isn’t exactly news to point out that publishing is in crisis. Now that digital text can be delivered in a format which offers a viable substitute for the physical book, there are fears that the publishing industry will experience an upheaval of biblical proportions. Observers draw an obvious comparison to the music industry, which has spent nearly a generation coping with an analogous upheaval thanks to the advent of digital audio. But I say unto you: a more apt comparison can be found in the experience of religion, whose institutions have been in crisis far longer than EMI or BMG.

I believe—oh yes I do—I believe the comparison is apt because, unlike big music labels, whose primary challenges arise from changes in technology, publishers face challenges which go to the very foundations of their beliefs. In our secular world, the credo has been demystified. The publisher’s loss of faith is more than merely analogous to the experience of organized religion; the crisis of one is the crisis of the other.

People of the Book

As a term of respect, the people of Islam speak of the children of Abraham and the followers of Jesus as “the people of the book.” Western religions tell us our names are written in the Book of Life while both Egyptians and Tibetans have a Book of the Dead. The collected wisdom of Moses, the first of our prophets, is borne in the Torah which itself is borne in the Ark. When Christians read from the Bible during worship, they often conclude with: “the Word of God.” Jesus is the Word made flesh. Logos. Whatever else you might think (or not) of Johannine theology, one thing is certain: unwittingly or otherwise, the Gospel of John entrenched in our cultural consciousness a notion of the book as a form of embodiment. Just as God could take His divine wisdom and set it in a Holy Book, so we could take our earthbound wisdom, the numinous drippings of our souls, and fix it to the page to comfort and guide future generations. With the book, we could defy death.

Gutenberg Changed Nothing

A scribal tradition delivered to us our earliest scriptures across two thousand years, a succession of textual reincarnations down to the age of Gutenberg. There is a debate about whether the digital revolution will be as historically significant to our age as the Gutenberg revolution to the Reformation. While I prefer not to gamble, if forced to it, I would wager that five hundred years from now historians will treat Gutenberg as a pop gun when compared to the ASCII nuclear explosion that has engulfed our age. Here’s why: Gutenberg did nothing to unseat our fundamental conception of the book as an embodiment. His printing press preserved the mystical sense that within the tactile covers of a book there lay something of its author’s spirit. Digital text, on the other hand, thoroughly disembodies our words and therefore challenges how we think even about thinking itself. (At the same time, I am cognizant of the irony that the word digital implies the very tactile quality which the digital revolution undermines.)

Demystification and Authority

In a moment of crisis, the publisher asks: What is a book? This echoes the long-standing question from religious thinkers: What is the source of our authority? For more than two generations, academic theologians have applied historical, text, redaction, and form criticism in an expanding toolkit of approaches to biblical scholarship which reveal the all-too-human process by which we have received our authoritative texts. And the academy is merely one of countless agents in the demystification of religious authority. The dominance of a secular science, the sheer volume at which our popular culture assaults the senses, the global reach of our media, the dislocation of labour brought about by deregulated markets, the commoditization of everything from water to reproduction, all these challenge the authority of the Book.

The threats to publishing cut across the same lines as those to religious authority. Independent booksellers fold as fast as suburban churches. Younger customers have been drawn away from reading by distractions like TV and movies, video games and social networks. Big box stores can resist the trends (incidentally contributing to the demise of independent booksellers) but they can’t compete with behemoths like Amazon. When even the old fogies start to worship on Amazon, places like Saddleback and Willowcreek, Chapters/Indigo and Borders are screwed. People have lost the faith.

Panic of the Faithful

Meanwhile the clergy are scrambling to find creative ways to slow the exodus. Fr Cory Doctorow embraces DRM-free text and gives everything away. Sister Margaret Atwood sets up a twitter account and takes her religion to the digital masses. A clueless orthodoxy screeches that our salvation lies in the cult of copyright. All of the many postures that our clerics assume—the scurrying, the expostulations, the anger, the tears, oh the wailing and gnashing of teeth—all of it can be interpreted as expressions of grief.

The book may not be dead, but its cultural significance expired last Friday and there hasn’t been a resurrection yet. Don’t hold your breath. Demystification is like “getting” an optical illusion. Once you understand the visual trick, you can’t reset your brain to an earlier time when you couldn’t see the illusion. Henceforth, you will always see it. In the same way, once the “magic” of the book disappears, we can never revisit a naive pre-digital state any more than a chick can crawl back inside an egg.

We may have nostalgia for that feeling of excitement that comes from cracking open a new book, the touch of the paper, the smell of glue on the binding, the anticipation of discovering new worlds within its covers. But there will never be a time henceforth when text cannot be digital. More to the point, there will never be a time henceforth when text is not demystified. This is a fact of our circumstances and, unless we choose to live in denial, we must acknowledge those circumstances and get on with it.

Requiescat in Pace

THE WORLD'S UGLIEST WOMAN

This is a piece about the dangers of  writing book reviews. But if you want to hop onto that boxcar, you’ll have to ride with me for a while on a different track. My monkey brain can’t leap to book reviewing without first crouching beside a different bunch of bananas. (I apologize, too, for mixing my metaphors.)

I met the world’s ugliest woman while walking with my camera along a path through environmentally sensitive lands. She was there on a commemorative plaque beside her husband. The plaque said they were the original owners of the land and the woman had donated it to an environmental organization after her husband’s death. The husband was a fierce-looking gent with full beard that reminded me of King Edward VII. As for the wife, she looked like she howled at the moon and licked herself clean each night after a lope through the forest. It would be an understatement to say that she was hirsute.

I took a photo of the plaque and wanted to do a speculative piece, imagining their life together. I wondered if maybe the wife was a man in drag. Maybe they were pioneers of the gay marriage, one dressing up in business suits to pose as a man’s man while the other put on Victorian dresses and presented as a proper lady. But I held off on writing the piece.

Google can be a bitch. The last time I wrote something about somebody long dead, the deceased’s great-great-great-grand-nephew found it and posted a longish comment taking me to task for it. Fortunately, he was good-humoured about the whole thing and could see well enough that I was winking and nodding as I wrote. But what if I wrote a speculative post about this couple and it turned out that they had children? What if some great-granddaughter sprung from the loins of the world’s ugliest woman hunted me down and appeared on my doorstep with a meat cleaver raised above her head?

I did a google search and discovered that the Edwardian husband and his hairy wife did, indeed, have children and so it is entirely possible that, if I wrote a speculative piece about a man/woman prancing in Victorian dress, one of countless indignant descendants would descend upon me and publicly give me proper hell. Although one can’t libel the dead, the possibility that I might be contacted by enraged descendants has caused me to self-censor. I won’t be posting the photo. I won’t be identifying them by name. And I won’t be writing any story about gay marriage pioneers in the old west.

The tendency to self-censor infects book reviewing too. The FTC has a rule that if you review stuff on your blog and the stuff you review has been given to you for free, then you need to say so. According to the FTC, getting an ARC for free from the publisher will somehow bias your opinion. That’s bullshit, of course. What biases your opinion is the fear that you’ll wake up one night with an author pressing the muzzle of a sawed-off shotgun to your temple because he was insulted by your review of his latest limerick collection.

To avoid the shotgun scenario, there is a strong incentive for reviewers to say nothing but nice things. It’s the kindergarten rule of reviewing: if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. It isn’t all that helpful to readers, since they have no indication what books to avoid, but it does ensure that reviewers keep all their fingers and other important body parts. When I first started doing book reviews, I made the mistake of writing exactly what I thought of an acutely bad self-published novel (see the next chapter). Sometimes I can’t help myself. And bad writing makes for entertaining reviewing. When the author read my review, he was apoplectic. He emailed photos of lions fucking. He wrote a note suggesting that I deserved to be raped in the same manner as the beasts on the receiving end of these leonine fuckfests. I wasn’t worried. I knew it was an idle threat. He lived on the east coast where they don’t have easy access to lions.

I don’t really care about FTC requirements since I’m a Canadian writing from what I consider to be a Canadian perspective (whatever that is) and am not subject to American laws. But since many of the books I review are from American publishers, I think it’s important to understand what the FTC is on about. I think they lump books together with electronics and cars and household appliances. And yes, if Apple sent me an iPad to review, I would be sorely tempted to gush. But a book? Does a book have enough intrinsic value that it could influence my opinion? What about an eARC—a digital copy of a book that isn’t even in its final form? If I tried to sell it on the open market, what price could I get for it? To be honest, its value is probably less than zero. It’s a liability. Reading it takes valuable time from doing other things. And if it’s putrid writing, then it takes even more valuable time because I have to find inventive ways to clear the toxins from my head.

What the FTC rules don’t capture in my experience is the fact that after I post a book review, the author and/or publisher typically contacts me on the same day to acknowledge the review. More often than not, reviewing is a form of relationship building. That kind of immediacy, through Google and Facebook and Twitter, is unprecedented. And that is a far more powerful influence on the way I present my opinion than any advance copy could be.

For one thing, I don’t offer ratings. That’s a hollow system anyways. As Amazon’s reviewing system demonstrates, the ratings business is easily gamed to improve sales. For another thing, I avoid simplistic evaluations—oh, this is good, that is bad. Instead, I’d rather draw the writing into conversation. What is it saying? How does it say what it is saying? Is it in conversation with other writing? How does it fit within larger narratives? If writing can support this kind of reflection, then the FTC’s (infantile) concern for bias becomes irrelevant.

Afterthought: the genre of book probably also influences the manner of review. Non-fiction is easier to review objectively because I critique the ideas and worry less about ego (both mine and the author’s). But because I review mostly literary fiction and poetry, I usually find the process murkier. My sense is that literary writers invest more of their selves in their words and, as a result, make themselves more vulnerable when they submit those words to the opinion of others.

BAD RELIGION MAKES FOR BAD WRITING

Does bad religion produce bad writing? If we use Jill, by G.R. Spiecker, as a gauge, then the answer is yes. Jill is a tract of dubious Catholicism masquerading as dubious fiction. One can forgive an author his religion since, however it comes to him—whether by upbringing, cultish coercion, or even by grace—it lies beyond his control (at least in theory). But the sin of bad writing is unpardonable.

First, let’s consider the novel as a novel, then let’s consider how the author’s religious stance may have infected his writing. Jill is the book of Job (minus the nuance) recast as the tale of a homeless woman on the streets of New York City. Jill began life in the midst of a virtuous southern gentility, but as a teenager she succumbed to the overpowering wiles of her (Protestant) pastor who impregnated her. With an abortion, a refusal to reveal the father’s identity, and her own father’s demand that she kneel before her pastor and beg forgiveness, Jill flees her family and runs to the big city. There, she joins the hippies, goes to Woodstock, does drugs, is forced into prostitution, and escapes the oldest profession by living ignominiously on the streets. Years later, she witnesses an accident and runs to the local rectory for help. As fast as the reader can say “Deus ex machina” (what other kind of Deus is there?) the woman has been saved from her sordid life, is living in a posh apartment with a Henry Higgins look-alike who wines her and dines her and takes her to shows on Broadway, she contracts lung cancer, inherits a fortune, and leaves it all to Father Tom’s school, just as all the poor children are about to confront the horrible prospect of having to locate another private school to attend. Most importantly, Jill is vindicated. The Protestant pastor is caught with another girl in flagrante delicto, confesses all in a letter to Jill’s father, and restores order to the universe by committing suicide.

In synopsis, it all sounds quite heartwarming, almost Dickensian. Why then did I find it so difficult to finish? Here’s a list—a bit of a cautionary tale in its own right:

First, on the book’s final page is a note of thanks to the proof reader. Instead of thanking her, the author should have shot her. Second, there are mechanical problems that make Bulwer Lytton read like a poet from the lake district: “On Thursday, Father Tom presided over the requiem mass, and he was interred at Saint Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx.” One wonders how Father Tom presided at his own mass. Was he buried alive? (Shouldn’t he have given himself extreme unction first?) Or this: “He gave the impression of being all business, but he was obviously stunned … ” How can this be obvious if he has just given the opposite impression? And the adverbs! Oh, the humanity! “Peter was obviously deeply affected by Jill’s story.” It seems no page is complete without at least one instance of either “fortunately” or “unfortunately.” And let’s not forget the redundancies, like being “emotionally moved.” Third, the author seems intent on explaining absolutely everything, even to the point of irrelevance. “In doing this, Jill now realized she was conveying to Peter her subtle message of thanks which she hoped he understood.” The author wants to be certain the reader gets the point, since the reader is obviously deeply stupid.

But it is the final item on my list which is most problematic. The author has a boundless appetite for paternalistic moralizing. Jill, now close to redemption, volunteers to serve a Thanksgiving dinner to the homeless: “Since Jill was customarily the recipient at these charity meals, she was amazed at the amount of work and people it required to provide them.” It was a measure of restraint that kept the author from having Jill deliver a speech to all the homeless, instructing them to be duly grateful. Peter, the Henry Higgins stand-in, drives to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving. “During his visit, he had an opportunity to witness, firsthand, the austere Amish way of life and was deeply moved.” It’s enough to make me gag on my yams. While the impulse to explain everything merely implies that we are stupid, the impulse to explain how we ought to respond implies that we are also depraved and, like Jill, in need of redemption.

Why would an author do this to us? I return to my opening question and wonder if there is something about the believing that bleeds into the writing. Here is my theory: both the believing and the writing betray a deep-seated anxiety. Near the end of the novel, in a single sentence, the author makes explicit the source of anxiety which drives his writing: “Things are so much more beautiful when your life is in order, thought Jill.” A world without order seems untenable. It seemed untenable to Job’s companions. It seems untenable to most of us. It seems that way to the author. A Deus ex machina would solve all our problems. In the absence of such a solution, the author has assumed the role for himself and, through the amazing power of authorial fiat, has created his own little universe where he can manipulate the characters (much like a child playing with toy soldiers on his bedroom floor) so that everything comes out right in the end. When Peter offers a gift (a rosary that belonged to Mother Theresa), Father Tom promises to say extra prayers for him. Order demands an equitable exchange between good deeds and grace; in the long run, you reap what you sow; sheep go to heaven, goats go to hell; and so on. In the author’s universe, redemption is a mathematical proposition. But in such a universe, what need is there for God? Wouldn’t an algorithm do nicely? Just input our lives, execute a calculation of our merits, and spit out a disposition. Why not write novels in the same way? The details don’t matter. Just input a few generic characters, a variable of tension, and execute a neat resolution. Except for one little problem: things do not always come out right in the end and neat resolutions are as rare as frogs on the moon. This is not a bad thing; it means only that the universe is complicated—more complicated than one would conclude if Jill were the only available evidence.

SOME PLEASANT DAYDREAM: THE STORIES OF JIRI KAJANE

Sometimes, book reviewing carries risks. You’ve already seen how one negative review resulted in a threatening email from the author along with a puzzling photo of mating lions. But that’s nothing compared to the next review. After I shared my thoughts about Some Pleasant Daydream: The Stories of Jiri Kajanë, I was contacted by the FBI. Seriously. First, read my original post, and then I’ll explain.

The Original Post:

Sometimes my blog is a courtroom. I enter my posts into evidence. Today, the defendant is independent e-publishing. The charge? Producing lame content. As counsel for the defense, my job is to cast doubt on that charge. My strategy? I’ll call to the witness box examples of good, independently produced e-writing that can stand up to anything the big-media publishing houses have on offer. It won’t be an easy job. I’ll be the first to admit that most writing out there is appalling. But that’s not a criticism unique to indy e-publishing. After all, didn’t a Simon & Schuster imprint just publish a novel by Snooki?

My first witness is Some Pleasant Daydream: The Stories of Jiri Kajanë, translated from the Albanian by Kevin Phelan and Bill U’Ren.

Q. Good morning, Mr. Daydream. Is it okay if I call you that?

A. That’s fine.

Q. Mr. Daydream, although you’re an independently produced book, you still have a publisher, don’t you?

A. Yes.

Q. Go on.

A. Oh, I’m sorry. I’m given to understatement. I like to keep my prose spare. I would have said “clean and spare” but that would have cluttered the sentence. You see what I mean?

Q. Perfectly. The publisher?

A. Oh yes, it’s Fiction Attic Press. You can find it online, you know. It’s someone in Northern California, which I find interesting given that I’m a book set in Albania. I mean, what the hell does Northern California have to do with Albania? Anyhoo, I’m supposed to be the first in a series of books called Voices of Eastern Europe. And they’re selling me through Smashwords, Barnes & Noble and Scribd.

Q. So tell us a bit about yourself.

A. I’m a series of interrelated stories all told from the point of view of a minor bureaucrat in Tiranë who used to work for the Ministry of Symbols but has since risen to the rank of Deputy Minister in the Ministry of Slogans. In effect, he sits around all day dreaming up clever catch phrases to make governmental actions more palatable to the general populace. He used to be married to Ana but they have divorced. Even now he sometimes longs for Ana, but is a little bit afraid of her. He had a brother Janos who, along with his nephew, was drowned at sea. He also has an aging father and through his connections at the ministry, has procured for the old man a place at a spa. Most of the action is driven by his friend, Leni, sous chef at the Hotel Dajti who is forever cooking up schemes to make a little money on the side. The Deputy Minister isn’t the type to cook up schemes on his own; he isn’t a rebel or a natural born law breaker. But he doesn’t mind accommodating Leni’s sometimes odd requests because they are a welcome break from the monotony of life as a state-sponsored liar.

Q. Can you offer some examples of Leni’s schemes?

A. Oh sure. Take the first story “Okay, a Cake Then!” (which you can read as a free sample). Okay, so it doesn’t involve a full-blown scheme, but it gives a hint of things to come.

Q. How so?

A. Well, the Deputy Minister is upset at the death of a friend and so visits Leni. They talk, they drink, they reminisce, and then Leni suggests they bake a cake together. We see how Leni’s spontaneity buoys up the Deputy Minister. Always, there is this spontaneity and a willingness to improvise that brings these schemes to fruition. If Leni has a parallel in Western writing, it’s probably Milo Minderbender from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Also, the idea of baking a cake anticipates one of Leni’s more mature schemes.

Q. Which is?

A. Huh?

Q. You were going to tell the court about one of Leni’s more mature schemes.

A. I’m sorry. I got distracted by your blog. How do you keep your background so white?

Q. The scheme?

A. Sorry. It’s another story about baking—sort of—called “Wake up, It’s time to Go to Sleep.” A Party bigwig name Schlobodkin is having a promotion feast at the hotel where Leni works and the food supplies are to be stored beforehand in a warehouse. Leni wants to break into the warehouse, steal all the flour, and sell it on the black market. Things don’t go exactly as planned but the thieves do make off with some inedible biscotti.

There are other schemes too. For example, Leni plays pimp to an Italian woman whose husband is impotent, or at least infertile. The woman desperately wants a child, and because the Deputy Minister is a dead ringer for the husband, Leni has volunteered him for the role of sperm donor.

Perhaps the most complicated scheme is an academic boondoggle. In the book’s most satisfying story, “Weights & Measures”, Leni has received a letter from Ian James, the editor of a prestigious literary journal. Leni had assisted Ian James in assembling an anthology of Indian stories and purportedly enlisted the help of Bhanuprasad Armritraj, the chair of Indian Studies at Tiranë University. Ian James is pleased to announce that he will be visiting Tiranë and wishes to meet with Leni and professor Armritraj. Of course there is no professor Armritraj and there is no department of Indian Studies at Tiranë University. Leni has developed a disguise and wants the Deputy Minister to pose as the professor. If the meeting goes well, he hopes to sell another batch of stories for an Albanian anthology.

At the same time, Leni has agreed to have his cousin Leke, a scale maker from Peshkopia, recalibrate a friend’s broken scale. Again, there is no cousin named Leke and Leni knows nothing about scales. Nevertheless, working with a handbook on scale repair, the Deputy Minister takes apart the friend’s scale, cleans it and reassembles it. Although he can’t figure out how to fix the scale, he does get it to work properly. There follows this exchange:

“Do you remember how the scale has the twenty different internal counterweights?”

“Yes, those green things we took out.”

“Exactly. Well, I made some calculations, and one by one, I shaved off a small amount from each, exponentially increasing the amount. So now, essentially, each measurement the scale gives will be technically wrong, but nonetheless, it will appear to be right.”

A long silence arises as Leni considers this tactic. He fiddles with the scale and then half-heartedly measures two more weights. He seems pleased. “So what you are saying,” he says, “is that the scale is still broken, but now, only the scale knows it.”

“Precisely,” I say.

As Deputy Minister for the Ministry of Slogans, he has a talent for stacking up lies that produce a kind of truth.

Applying a similar logic to the matter of story anthologies that promise local colour, we find ourselves in the literary equivalent of a hall of mirrors. When the Deputy Minister reads the anthology of Indian stories, he discovers “A Bounty in Mumbai,” a tale that “follows the exploits of a young man named Nagar Afroz and his best friend, a local official from Bangalore, as they attempt to hatch a plan that will gain them six hundred pounds of free flour and the unattainable love of an Italian industrialist’s daughter.” In effect, Leni has told their own story, but in such general terms that it could be transplanted into any context. However, when Leni tries to do the same with his Albanian stories, Ian James offers an unexpected response:

“…it’s just that they’re not very Albanian, if you know what I mean. Love and relationships and family concerns, these are all fine, but where is the political strife, the tales of the zealous underground resistance, the humanity in the face of the oppressive dictatorship? Where is the lone hero fighting a struggle against mind-numbing governmental tyranny?”

In a writing frenzy, Leni produces a new set of stories to satisfy a Western editor’s expectations of what an Albanian story ought to look like.

Q. Tell me, Mr. Daydream, what about us? What are we to suppose of the Western editor who claims to have arranged for the translation of an Albanian author’s stories?

A. Sorry?

Q. Is it not also possible that these are Western stories passed off as Albanian stories by trying to satisfy Western expectations of what an Albanian story ought to look like?

A. Oh, I see what you mean. Except that these stories don’t satisfy Western expectations. Sure, there are references to Enver Hoxha, there’s an ice cream vendor who disappears and shows up dead a few days later, there are travel restrictions, food shortages, and pirated TV from Italy. But the stories are told with a deft touch that suggests bittersweet comedy. The communist-era hardships fade into the background as we watch two men struggle with simpler issues like love, the death of loved ones, scarcity and boredom.

Update:

After I had posted my “review”, I had to make an adjustment which I posted as follows:

Five months ago I posted a review of Some Pleasant Daydream: The Stories of Jiri Kajane, which has also gone by the title Winter in Tirane. On Friday, Ian Jack of The Guardian revealed that Jiri Kajane was, in fact, two creative writing students from California named Kevin Phelan and Bill U’Ren. To explain the hoax, Jack writes: “As young writers, they’d discovered that their stories, which then had contemporary US settings, attracted little attention; perhaps too playful to fit the fashion for trailer-park realism.” So they made up Jiri Kajane and posed as his translator to sell stories during the 90′s to Glimmer Train, the Chicago Review, and the Michigan Quarterly Review. One of their stories was anthologized alongside the likes of Ian McEwan, Joyce Carol Oates, Patricia Highsmith, Graham Greene and Ernest Hemingway (who are probably also hoaxes). Now, Phelan works for the FBI and U’Ren teaches creative writing.

I suppose I could get myself twisted in a knot the way Oprah did over James Frey, but it’s hard to get self-righteous about this pair. Maybe if I were Albanian I might accuse them of stealing my voice, whatever that means. But I feel more inclined to pour a glass of Scotch and say cheers; if you’re ever in town, drop by for a drink. This (book + hoax) is consummate storytelling.

I also note with some satisfaction the final question I posed in my review: “Is it not also possible that these are Western stories passed off as Albanian stories by trying to satisfy Western expectations of what an Albanian story ought to look like?”  Turns out I was closer to the mark than I had suspected.

Afterword:

Shortly after my second post, I received an email from Kevin Phelan whom The Guardian had identified as an employee of the FBI. He thanked me for my posts and said that he would definitely take me up on my offer of a drink the next time he’s up north. He also extended an invitation to join him for drinks the next time I’m in San Francisco. It sounds dramatic to say I was once contacted by the FBI because of a book review, and while being dramatic is not on the same order as perpetrating a literary hoax, it still falls well on this side of the fictional divide.

MRS. DALLOWAY

I must be maturing; I think I’m developing a deeper appreciation for Virginia Woolf. My first encounter with this author came when I was 18 and had to read Edward Albee‘s play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in high school. I had no idea what Virginia Woolf had to do with the play, and so, because I didn’t know any better, I decided to read something by Virginia Woolf. I can’t remember the title of the book; it was an anthology of essays including “A Room of One’s Own.” The prose was dense, almost impenetrable. I understood little of what I read. It felt like I was swimming in a stream that was just a little too deep for me to touch bottom.

A few years later, while doing an undergraduate degree in English at Victoria College, I had to read To The Lighthouse. Again, I waded into this dense prose, and again, I understood little of what I read. Now, as my 42nd birthday approaches (roughly the same age as Woolf when she published Mrs. Dalloway) and after countless bouts of major depression (just like Woolf), I find myself reading her with a great empathy. Unexpectedly, I hear her words with new ears and a new mind. I feel her writing. Its weight bears down on me and I can no longer shrug it off the way I could when I was younger. But I forgive myself; inexperience guaranteed my failure to understand this woman.

When I was younger, I had male expectations of writing. There would be conflict and then resolution of the conflict. All writing was like an Agatha Christie mystery novel—there was a puzzle to be solved, fractured meanings to be assembled like shards of pottery at an archeological dig. There were facts in an objective world and these facts had to be glued together in ways that make a novel. But Woolf presents a new—but no less real—world of interior puzzles. Her objective reality is the reality of the mind in operation. And so Mrs. Dalloway opens in a kind of free association game which, among other things, demonstrates the mysterious workings of the human mind. A motor car passes. However, what we encounter is not so much the fact (through its description and exposition and exegesis) of a motor car passing, as it is a pageant of responses. Characters stop and watch as the motor car passes. It is the motor car of an important person. The windows are obscured. Could it be royalty? Characters reflect upon the meaning of the motor car, and in the course of their reflections, they reveal as much about themselves as they do about the object of their attentions. These are the “caves” Woolf speaks of, the spaces she carves out behind each of her characters, spaces she fills with a boundless depth. And so the novel proceeds—swimming through the minds of the people who form its landscape, and as it proceeds, Woolf offers us an account more real than the most substantial of facts, proving to her readers that these gossamer things we call thoughts and feelings lie at the foundation of all that gives us our being. In the novel, Woolf herself likens this view of consciousness to a “single spider’s thread” which “after wavering here and there attaches itself to the point of a leaf.”

Two characters dominate the novel, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, sanity and madness, civilised gentility and the brokenness of war, coherence and gibberish. Clarissa Dalloway is an upper-class woman in her early fifties and, ostensibly, she is preparing for a party that evening. Septimus Warren Smith is a young man who served during the Great War (the novel is set in or around 1923) but is suffering the effects of “shell-shock” as he tries to return to life in the ordered world of post-war London. Woolf offers us a first-hand glimpse at the mind as it wanders through responses tainted by depression and psychosis. Septimus Warren Smith responds to the real world in ways that are real and meaningful—but not for us.

Although just as opaque and as rich as anything else by Woolf, here she sounds out all the notes for me to grasp, if only I would listen. In fact, it is easy to understand Mrs. Dalloway. Although Woolf scatters clues throughout the novel, I need offer only two to equip the prospective reader for a rich encounter.

First, is a meeting between Dr. Holmes and Septimus Warren Smith when the good doctor is preparing Smith for a retreat to the country where he can recover. Holmes notes that Smith served with distinction during the war and his employer has the highest opinion of him, so he should have no concern about taking a little time for his own care. Then comes this line, apparently a product of Smith’s madness: “He [Smith] had committed an appalling crime and been condemned to death by human nature.” Smith’s appalling crime is this: he can feel nothing. He had a commanding officer, Evans, whom he regarded as an admirable man, but when Evans was killed, Smith felt nothing. In the same manner, he met a young woman in an Italian village, Rezia, and asked her to marry him; but now, as he recalls all this, he recalls also that he felt nothing.

Second, is the reflection of Peter Walsh after his meeting with Clarissa Dalloway. Peter Walsh has just returned from service in India and is trying to re-establish himself in London because he is arranging to marry a woman he met in India. Years ago, as a young man, he loved Clarissa. ” … Clarissa had a theory in those days—they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people.” Not knowing people and not being known. This is the essential tragedy of consciousness. We are isolated yet we crave connectedness. As Peter Walsh reflects, the situation is wholly unsatisfactory—and, we note, wholly inevitable.

Woolf presents us with what seems to be the intractable dilemma of being. And yet she does not leave us without hope. Her novel poses a great question: how are we ever to know or to be known? Her novel stands, in itself, as an answer to the question—or at least as an example of how one goes about answering the question. One relies upon empathy and imagination. As a monument to both these skills, Woolf demonstrates how it is we nurture them, then execute them. She drifts in and out of the minds and hearts of her characters in a way that knows them intimately and, while leaving them wholly known, preserves their integrity and dignity.

A final note of a more idiosyncratic nature. Dr. Holmes is (perhaps) drawn from Virginia Woolf’s own encounters with the mental health professionals of her day. At that time, psychiatry was a fledgling specialty of medicine. What is most striking about the portrayal of both Dr. Holmes and his patient, Septimus Warren Smith, is the poverty of the language to account for Smith’s depression and psychosis. Now, we might say of Smith that he was suffering from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). But at the time Woolf was writing, Sigmund Freud was still a practitioner and lecturer in Vienna, and it could hardly be said that any one methodology or “science” of the mind had yet acquired anything approaching the status of an organized discipline. Except for a few words like “shell-shock,” Woolf could not name Smith’s illness; the best she could do was to describe its effects. Although, when measured against other branches of medicine, psychiatry remains a fledgling discipline, nevertheless, the changes in our understanding, and more especially, in our vocabulary, are astounding. Now, we talk about neuroreceptors and serotonin and norepinephrine; and psychoanalysis is only one in a growing array of tools which mental health professionals have at their disposal, tools like electromagnetic stimulation, deep brain stimulation and mindfulness.

Naming a thing makes it no more real. A person who is depressed or psychotic or both is no less so because we neglect to diagnose them. But naming a thing has one great virtue. A name, a specialized vocabulary, a more refined assignment of meaning—all these are social acts. They depend upon the existence of a group for whom the name or vocabulary or meaning is common. And so, to the extent that we join hands when we name something, to that extent do we know a thing more fully, and are known—even if only by a little—by those with whom we share our vocabulary. Those like Septimus Warren Smith and, more notably, Virginia Woolf, who have lost sight of their connectedness also lose sight of meaning in their lives, and so they see no alternative but to hurl themselves from a window or to walk into a stream with pockets weighted by rocks.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH PLASTIC EXPLOSIVES

Someday I would like to write a dissertation. I would use big words and quote great minds and when I was done I would tell people that I had made a definitive statement: a philosophy of the banal. I would write it in the spirit of Albert Camus who offered the world a philosophy of the absurd. Only I would do Camus one better. Camus’ famous essay, which opens The Myth of Sisyphus, is a deep reading of the early 20th century—the rise of nationalism, Fascism, totalitarian regimes, a war that engulfed all of Europe and spread like a cancer even to his home in North Africa.

Those victims of the 20th century who survived needed men like Camus to describe what they had experienced. But the victors saw no need for outsiders to hold up a mirror to them; like blind painters, they would describe themselves to themselves. The most spectacularly victorious of the victors—America, Britain, Canada, Australia—framed their success in terms of freedom and democracy which they exercised through advertising and consumption. The victors replayed the spectacle again and again—in Korea, Viet Nam, the Falklands, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan—but the cry “We fight for our freedom!” rang hollow because the victors had no attachment to those places.

Life for the victors is dominated by the values of a bloated middle class for whom Camus’ absurdist philosophy holds no meaning. We have “freedom” to give us meaning. To suggest an absence of meaning, as Camus did, is itself absurd. And yet the longer we live in this suburban peace of ours, the more we come to recognize the limit of our franchise: the glorious right to purchase kitschy consumer goods that break the day after the warranty expires. We show off the bright shiny things we’ve bought, smile at our neighbours through plastic Botox™ lips, then declare ourselves happy because we have everything the ads tell us we ever wanted.

We, the victors, have embraced the banal, not simply as a description, but as a philosophy. Even as Camus wrote of absurdity as a philosophical precept, he recognized that it deserved its own literature, and so he gave it a literary push with his own pen. In my own humble way I have endeavoured to do something similar, giving banality its due here on my blog. It has been a lonely endeavour, but I have discovered a kindred spirit in Zsuzsi Gartner and her collection of short stories, Better Living Through Plastic Explosives.

Zsuzsi Gartner is from Vancouver. That fact is important, not only because many of her stories are set in and around Vancouver, but also because Vancouver has come out to the whole world as a Mecca of banality. While ordinary people in Egypt take to the streets and topple a dictator, and women in Saudi Arabia risk prison for the simple act of driving a car, Canadian youth riot in the streets of Vancouver because men who are paid millions of dollars to whack a piece of hardened rubber across a sheet of ice fail to perform as expected. This is the Vancouver Gartner documents.

Two points of clarification when writing of suburban banality in reference to Gartner’s work:

1) To say that Gartner writes about suburban banality is not to suggest Gartner is a banal writer. On the contrary, her writing is intelligent, playful, and filled with wit. When a woman plucking grey hairs swept them into the toilet and flushed, they “swirled into a small, furious animal before disappearing with a gurgle.”  Meanwhile, her lover “smelled hairless, like a peeled cantaloupe.”  In another story, a young filmmaker aspired to create a “moving picture so sublime the intended viewer’s heart would fold in on itself in an origami of joy.”  Only a really good writer can create the space for readers to encounter and savour such gems. Gartner is like a literary Pez™ dispenser, popping the bricks out in rapid succession and loading a fresh pack of the sugared nuggets with each new story.

2) A related clarification: potentially banal pop culture references (like my Pez™ dispenser comment above) do not necessarily constitute a piece of writing as an artifact of banal pop culture. We don’t say “Parker’s Back” is a Catholic story just because Flannery O’Connor deployed Catholic imagery any more than we say that Kelly Link eats brains for breakfast because some of her stories feature zombies. My syllogism may be a bit off, but you see my point. Gartner laces her stories with a healthy sprinkling of banality, but that does not make her stories banal.

I am reminded of the old koan: how do you write critically about a banned work without getting yourself banned? The same problem applies here, mutatis mutandi. In fact, the same problem plagues any writer who tries to walk that narrow ledge with their backs to the wall of “high” culture and their toes wiggling over the chasm of “low” culture. Critics love to give such writers a shove and shout gleeful platitudes as they fall.

But I am inclined to think that, for writers living amongst the victors, there is no other ledge to walk. Those who write serious works of suffering and redemption, or suffering and tragedy, or even suffering and absurdity, come off as fraudulent. Suffering succotash, such writing is so far removed from the life of most North Americans that we can hardly read it without asking first if the author has done a good job of branding himself.

Banality IS our suffering. It is our harrowing trial, our bed of nails, our vision quest. As a culture, we have not yet worked out how the spiritual poverty of middle-class surfeit will deliver us to some new reality, some redeeming wisdom, or maybe a fall to rival Milton’s. But some, like Gartner, are mapping the terrain of what may prove to be a discrete genre—call it suburban banality—by declaring its conventions.

Here are a few of those conventions as revealed in Better Living Through Plastic Explosives:

1) Cul-de-sacs

Nothing screams suburbia quite like a cul-de-sac. In case you weren’t aware of its etymology, cul-de-sac is Quebecois for “dead end”. However, its symbolic value is trite, almost cliché (another Quebecoisism meaning “tired” e.g. voulez vous cliché avec moi ce soir). More importantly, the physical shape of a cul-de-sac throws neighbours into claustrophobic proximity. While most suburban settings, especially those involving thoroughfares, afford their inhabitants a fair degree of anonymity, the cul-de-sac does not. It is a useful literary device for forcing characters to reveal themselves to one another in ways they wouldn’t otherwise consider even with their therapist.

2) Supernatural Beings

Often this takes the form of an alien invasion. This is the expectation generated by the title of the story “We Come In Peace”, but Gartner surprises by resorting to mass angelic possession instead—kind of a religious Midwich Cuckoos. Five teens (who live on a cul-de-sac of course) wake up one morning to find themselves possessed by the spirits Zachriel, Elyon, Barman, Yabbashael and Rachmiel. The angels have trouble adjusting to life as suburban teenagers. Being good just doesn’t cut it. One gets sucked into online gaming. Another gets pregnant. Everything goes downhill from there when the teen angels join forces with three wise men (homeless men who live in Hastings Creek) to race shopping carts down Mountain Highway.

Gartner provides a variation on this theme with “The Adopted Chinese Daughters’ Rebellion” when all the sanctimonious residents of yet another cul-de-sac adopt Chinese girls whose papers are stamped with the ominous “resident alien” label. As culturally sensitive white professionals, they try to raise the Chinese girls in their indigenous traditions (complete with the one family/one child rule). The Chinese girls pretty much go the way of the angels and turn into a bunch of bad-asses.

3) Political Correctness

We’ve already had a taste of this with “The Adopted Chinese Daughters’ Rebellion” which itself is reminiscent of the South Park episode in which Kyle’s parents move to San Francisco to live with more cultured people who sniff one another’s farts and drive new hybrid cars like the Pious.

Gartner takes PC-skewering to fresh heights with “Mr. Kakami”. Sydney Gross is a Vancouver film producer who tells the story of his star filmmaker, Patrick Kakami, gone AWOL. To secure a location permit on native land—on an island of old-growth forest off the coast of B.C., Syd and the crew had to attend a sweat lodge to demonstrate their spiritual integrity. After their sweaty ordeal, the lead actress climbs an old tree with a load of energy bars and Red Bull and refuses to come down as a protest against globalization.  Syd has a vision, which isn’t supposed to happen to crass people like him. And Kakami disappears into the forest. When Syd hunts him down in a cave, the two sit like a pair of Platonic philosophers watching firelight flicker on the cave wall and sharing a conversation about the meaning of life. Kakami confesses that he sees things now. And what are these wise things he sees?

Scenes from Indonesian shadow plays, O. Selznick’s burning of Atlanta, the telephone call from Paris, Texas, Walt’s hippos in tutus, Lillian Gish in silent anguish, Harry and Sally in a clinch are reflected on the cave walls. A never-ending story.

4) Virility (or lack thereof)

Men fear for the loss of their virility. This is understandable. Suburbia was built on the backs of men who fought for our freedom. They were real men. They bequeathed their paradise to their children and grandchildren, but there was nothing we inheritors could do to deserve their bequest, no sacrifice great enough, no lawnmower powerful enough. Inevitably we who have grown fat on our unmerited peace must earn it, as Gartner makes clear in “Summer of the Flesh Eater”. A stranger moves into town—or cul-de-sac as the case may be. He is manly. He threatens to take the wives and impregnate them with the raw seed of his animal virility. Naturally the men must kill him, and not for any moral imperative. They are driven by something more fundamental than that—this is a Darwinian struggle—and the suburban intellectuals shall survive! Or at least prevent an impending devolution into the kind of primitive man who cooks meat on a barbeque.

5) Strange “Natural” Events

A Japanese cultural exchange student rides out of the forest on the back of a giant tortoise. Houses drop at random into house-sized sinkholes, but only when all the occupants are out. I have a theory about such things. We can’t read them as signs in a book and expect any more meaning than our ancestors divined from thunder storms and goat entrails. Stories that help the reader make sense of loss; the quest for closure; even Camus’ solemn declaration of absurdity. All these are misdirections that try to protect us from the fact that human beings have an almost infinite capacity to reduce even our most spiritual claims to a monstrous drivel. In the case of the sinkholes, their grand meaning distills to this: a Hummer-driving real estate agent is going to lose her commission because a $7.5 million house has disappeared. That’s it! As for the giant tortoise …

6) Foreign Languages

Foreign languages are important. They help us identify the aliens. Often these are dead languages—a Latin scholar lives on the cul-de-sac. Sometimes these are real languages—how else will the Adopted Chinese Daughters know their culture unless they learn Cantonese and Mandarin? But foreign languages are their best when we make them up. And so, in “Once We Were Swedes”, we have the reminiscences of a journalism teacher who used to speak to her husband in IKEAese.

7) Terrorism

There must be terrorism. And why not! After all, terrorism is the second most banal notion ever inflicted on the Western psyche. The first, of course, is that shit-flavoured definition of freedom we imagine is threatened by the aliens banging at our suburban doors. “Better Living Through Plastic Explosives” presents us with a twelve-step group for terrorists. Lucy is a recovering terrorist who hosts a gardening radio show, but she struggles against relapse every time a kid in a muscle car squeals past her front lawn.

I would add an eighth convention—cannibalism (especially as practised by zombies). However, apart from a hint of it in the title of “Summer of the Flesh Eaters”, cannibalism doesn’t figure prominently here, and zombies not at all. Maybe in the next collection. In the meantime, go out and buy lots of stuff (especially this book).

THE MIRROR, THE LAMP & THE IPAD

When I was feeling my way into the art of blogging, one of my first posts was a short piece on The Mirror and the Lamp, M.H. Abrams’ critical masterpiece on modern poetics. Although poetics may seem like an arcane subject, what gives Abrams’ book enduring relevance is that he’s really writing about something bigger. He’s writing about how we communicate or, even before that, how we think. Abrams explores the two principal metaphors we have traditionally used to explain to ourselves how we communicate: the mirror and the lamp. Mimesis and expression. On one model, our writing reflects back to the world a view of itself. On the other model, our writing shines from within, giving expression to an inner reality. Shakespeare’s Hamlet (the play held up as a mirror to nature) is an example of the first. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan (the mighty pleasure dome shaped like a womb) is an example of the second. But—and this is the crux of his argument—whether we realize it or not, we use these metaphors as criteria to judge the merit of poetry and, more generally, of all writing (and all art for that matter). We consider how closely writing conforms to one or other of these models and judge it accordingly. For example, as parents, we apply a mimetic evaluation when we praise our five-year-old for getting the eyes right on mommy’s face, then we tack the crayon drawing to the fridge with magnets. Ten years later, we apply an expressive evaluation to the same child—now a teenager—whose poetic angst drips off the pages of high school English assignments.

Toward a new poetics

Abrams was writing in 1953 and a lot has happened since then. If he had been writing even ten years later, maybe a feminist perspective would have leaked into his text. He might have noted “mimetic masculinity” and “expressive femininity” and the fact that our poetics are not gender neutral. Had he been writing twenty-five years later, he might have hopped aboard the postmodern train, noting the contingent nature of our assumptions and offering up a deconstruction of our poetics. So, for example, he might examine the reality reflected in the mirror, challenging its fixity and suggesting, instead, that it is socially constructed. But if Abrams had been writing sixty years later, what would he have come up with?

A poetics for the 21st century deserves a new metaphor. I propose the iPad. In addition, a new poetics deserves a new adjective to describe its governing metaphor. In their time, the words ‘mimetic’ and ‘expressive’ served us well. Now, it’s time to give ‘authentic’ a place at the table. Let me say a little more about authenticity and how the iPad serves as a metaphor to describe what it means for a poetry to be authentic. Treat this as a timid toe-dip into waters that deserve a raw naked cannonball dive.

Authentic Poetry

At first blush, the authentic looks a lot like the expressive. When we first see the word, it suggests integrity, an inner truth that refuses to conform to the false demands of a false world. It suggests an absence of duplicity, a self-effacement, a childlike engagement with the world. An authentic poem is a wysiwyg (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) poem. The words provide a sense of immediacy between the reader and the poet, even if the poet has been dead for a hundred years.

However, when I use the word, I mean something different—something more. I’m not offering a prescriptive statement; this isn’t a manifesto declaring what I think a poem ought to be. Instead, I’m offering a descriptive statement, declaring my observations of what other people think a poem ought to be. It’s empirical. It’s a statement of what is the case. It’s like an anthropological report, documenting the attitudes of readers, critics and poets of the early 21st century.

A good poem is an authentic poem. An authentic poem is real. It’s sincere. It’s an honest representation of the stuff sloshing around inside the poet’s heart. Again, that sounds for all the world like the Romantic mush of Abram’s expressive lamp. In fact, we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference if we didn’t know where all this heartfelt stuff comes from. In the case of a Romantic poet, the stuff of a good poem comes from some innate quality, a natural refinement of the spirit. Even if the poem springs from an opium dream, as is supposed to have happened when Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan, it is nevertheless contingent upon some prior nobility that shines through the fog and transforms it.

We bear a nostalgia for Romanticism, but we can’t believe any more in the nobility of the human spirit. It is impossible to reconcile with all we’ve learned from neuropsychiatry and our daily dose of hi-def images from any one of half a dozen theatres of war. Instead, the stuff we hold in our hearts and which we shine forth in our poetry is stuff we have put there ourselves, and most of it, unwittingly.

Internalization

We are cultural sponges. We soak up Hollywood liberalism with its LiveAid concerts for the less fortunate and its celebrity adoptions, the postcolonial equivalent of Christianizing little brown babies. We get a lump in the throat as we watch socially awkward frumpy men and women stick it to smart-mouthed hosts while scoring major recording contracts and producing viral YouTube videos. We flex our ethical muscles when we text our votes to the producers of reality TV shows, punishing bad behaviour by voting contestants off the island.

The preceding paragraph comprises a string of cultural references. I expect most of you will get those cultural references. I also expect that most of you will engage in a kind of eye-rolling grimace, admitting an awareness of people like Susan Boyle and Simon Cowell, but hoping to distance yourselves from these icons du jour by feigning contempt for the banality of their contexts and the feelings they evoke.

We wring ourselves into a bucket, and while the water looks clear—compassion for the vulnerable, delight at unexpected talents, a desire for order in our moral universe—it smells a bit off. There are any number of ways we could describe this act of wringing ourselves out. We could call it being honest, or digging deep, or being true to our inner selves. But the disturbing fact remains: the water didn’t come from us; we soaked it up from somewhere else. The act of wringing it from ourselves creates the illusion that it comes from within, and this allows us our nostalgia for the Romantic ideal.

The iPad

If our poetics stood in relation to our culture as easily as a sponge to water, this would be a simple post. But it isn’t the sponge that acts as metaphor for a poetics of authenticity. We find our poetics in the illusion the sponge facilitates.

A sponge functions as a container. Like any container, it is indifferent to the water’s source. The water might come from a clear spring, a rusted faucet, or a sewer. This points to the reason why a sponge makes a poor metaphor for a poetics of authenticity. The notion of authenticity includes an element of judgment. It would never do to be indifferent like a sponge. By judgment, I don’t refer to concerns about the quality of the poem’s words, its musicality, the colour of its language, its playfulness, the skill of its execution. I refer, instead, to concerns about the quality of its poet (for which the poem is merely evidence). Is he the sort of man to dig deep into his pocket while watching a benefit concert for starving children in Ethiopia? Is she the sort of woman to be moved to tears when she discovers that a homely woman has a glorious voice? In the face of these questions, the iPad is mightier than the sponge.

As a metaphor for a poetics of authenticity, the iPad already has the advantage that in its technical specifications it can function both as a mirror and as a lamp. In addition, it can function as a sponge, soaking up gigabytes of cultural juices through 3G and wi-fi networks, wringing them into your lap as you ride the subway or sit on a park bench. But there are differences. Where the sponge is indifferent, the iPad is highly selective in the juices it soaks up. The sponge is a natural substance harvested from the sea while the iPad is a bizarre substance manufactured by the world’s largest media conglomerate. Much of the content which reaches the iPad comes pre-filtered at the source. Apps cannot display full frontal nudity, although they can advocate a cure for being gay.

It’s only a metaphor, of course. It’s a metaphor for the way poetry shines forth an inner light that has been irradiated by a light from a wider world, but has been irradiated along specific frequencies or, to stay true to this new metaphor, has drawn on content delivered from specific IP addresses and filtered to produce a certain tone.  This is the tone of Apple and Oprah, of Rupert Murdoch and Amazon. This is the tone of authenticity: the paradoxical Romanticism of the 21st century: an inner light kindled from above, not stolen like Prometheus, but set ablaze by a Jovian arsonist with thunderbolts of cultural hegemony.

The ascendancy of the banal

The upshot of this post is simple: under the poetics of authenticity, almost all poetry becomes banal, even the good stuff. It doesn’t want to be banal; but it can’t help itself. Banality is invasive, like the zebra mussel, or better yet, like a virus—not an organic single-celled creature like the human immunodeficiency virus, but a coded creature that chews through your data. It arrives surreptitiously in your iPad, tumbling through your network like any other innocuous piece of data. You may not even notice. If it acts like malware, it will leave the functionality of your hardware intact but reveal personal data that you had never intended to disclose.

Maybe culture has always been invasive in this way, the tiniest incursions assaulting the whole body, turning it feverish and throwing it into convulsions. Maybe, but its DNA has mutated. The virus that attacks now does so with an intentionality that was never there before. Its invasions are more like the coded virus than its organic namesake; we can identify a creator and we can detect the motive for the creation. When a virus infects an iPad, the motive is usually money. The same holds true of today’s culture. Hundreds of years ago, cultural movements like the Reformation and the Enlightenment took hold without an obvious cause and spread organically. Today, the cultural movement we describe as globalization is often assumed in discussions of economic globalization, and although such discussions often carry with them a triumphalist tone, as if a universal and unified culture were the planet’s divinely ordained destiny, there is nothing divine about the wills that manipulate events to bring about this end. They are intentional and orchestrated in ways that present culture as an effete adjunct to robust economic goals.

Some may argue that this is nothing new. The cultural torchbearers of our colonial past—its missionaries—committed the early salvos in conquests which were motivated by the demand for precious metals and other resources. How has anything changed? Quite simply: missionaries believed that what they did had something to do with God, quite apart from the wealth their activities won. Today, the West’s cultural torchbearers have internalized the values of their “secular” counterparts (call them corporate conquistadors if you like) and so their motivations are indistinguishable. An entertainer like David Bowie issues personal bonds while a capitalist like Steve Jobs performs at his company’s AGM.

We don’t know how to think anymore about our cultural activities without drawing upon the language of our economic life. To consider the merit of a poem, we ask: What is its value? We speak of its worth. Where once, visual artists had religious patrons, today, almost all visual artists work in some aspect of marketing, and so the artist cannot help but adopt the goals (and the language) of the entrepreneur. In time, as the application of economic language hardens, its metaphorical roots disappear. We forget that early discussions of a novel’s worth concerned something numinous, and so we go on, without missing a beat, to discuss its marketability, its sales.

Traditional criteria continue to have a role in the discussion; we haven’t forgotten our mirrors and lamps. But talk of distribution and market penetration have elbowed them aside. There is nothing inherently wrong with talk of distribution and market penetration, just as there is nothing inherently wrong with HIV. But live with it long enough and the compromises it wreaks will leave the body vulnerable to other infections. We swallow our international treaties and trade liberalization and economic Darwinism as if we can absorb these things into our bloodstream without affecting our art. But it isn’t true. We see the cancer work its way into our language: the codewords of an ideology dropping like spittle with every breath, and a hateful polarization leaking from our spleen. We have come to accept it with a surprising complacency. At times we even forget that things were once different and we embrace our disease.

When we encounter a fresh work, we ask of it, not how closely it mirrors the world, nor how brilliantly it shines forth the artist’s light, but how closely it mirrors the world our artist has swallowed: it must be marketable; it must fit tightly inside the cellophane; and above all, it must not offend, unless, of course, giving offense is part of a calculated marketing strategy.

THE NECESSARY BLINDNESS OF FOCUSED WRITING

If a god were to blog, I think the result would look a lot like mine, i.e. not very good, at least not very good when measured by worldly standards where traffic is king. In the morning, a god might post the cure for breast cancer, and in the afternoon, an explanation of gravity. In the evening, a god might post all of Shakespeare’s lost masterpieces, and on the next morning, while sipping a cup of coffee, such a god might reveal a mantra that, when repeated a hundred thousand times, guarantees enlightenment. But if such a god continued in this way, those who stumbled on the godly blog would start to complain that the blog had no focus.

That’s my problem. I have no focus. This could be a photoblog, or a theology blog, or a social activism blog, or a cartoon blog, or a philosophy blog, or a poetry blog, or a CanLit blog, or a warm and fuzzy human interest blog, or a current events blog, or a fiction blog, but because I don’t choose a focus, this has become a kitchen sink blog. I’m a Zelig blogger. Wherever I am, that’s what I find myself blogging about.

It’s not such a bad thing to be interested in the world around me. But if I were a serious blogger, maybe I’d be more selective in what I posted. Maybe I’d give it a thematic coherence. It wouldn’t be just a photoblog; it would be a photoblog that focused on pictures of geese that make you say “awwwww.”  Or it wouldn’t be just a blog of pop-culture criticism; it would be an academic journal on Lady Gaga. You get the idea.

I’m not a serious blogger, of course. I’m just interested in being interested. However, because I’m insecure, I feel a need to justify my humble interest in being interested. While it won’t draw any more traffic to my site, it will make me feel better. As I proceed, you’ll discover that I’m not really writing about blogging at all. I’m writing about something altogether different. Maybe I’m writing about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. In fact, I’m writing about the meaning of focused writing.

The decision to write in a focused way inevitably involves us in an artificial narrowing of scope. This isn’t a new practice, but it has taken on a distinctive hue in today’s world. Nowadays, we narrow our focus, not for the sake of simplicity, not for ease of explanation, not even for aesthetic reasons, but because we want to package it and market it and sell it.

What sells in today’s world of non-fiction publishing? Oddly enough, what sells is the unified field theorem—the theory of everything. Every non-fiction writer wants to be the next Albert-fucking-Einstein. Everybody wants to be recognized as the person who drew a broad swath of knowledge into one grand pattern that accounted for everything and allowed us to dispense with fine-grained knowing.

Look at the best seller lists over the last decade:

Look at Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs & Steel, for instance, which tries to persuade us that all of human history has unfolded in ways that are ultimately traceable to the orientation of the continents. It’s pure dreck but people lap it up. Then there’s E.O. Wilson with his already forgotten Consilience. His big idea is that all knowledge falls within one big idea—nothing a baseball bat can’t disprove. There’s Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail which argues that the dissemination of culture via internet markets gives us access to more and richer culture because it makes “the long tail” more profitable. His work is demonstrably wrong, but no matter, he has another book out and we’ve all forgotten that he got it wrong the last time. After all, his status as guru of e-culture is determined by the culture he critiques: the truth doesn’t matter; it’s all about marketing. Or what about Jeffrey D. Sachs’ Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet in which he applies macroeconomic theories to persuade us that despite our nasty environmental ways, our planet is in great shape. This is the man who argues that as things warm up, we can just move our farming further north. Clearly, he has never toured the Canadian Shield or walked on tundra. You can’t grow crops from rock and it would take thousands of years to develop soil in this region. Even so, the fact that he may be mistaken doesn’t seem to matter. Another rising star in this firmament of packaged theorists is Malcolm Gladwell. He’s cranking out theories every other year now. Maybe he should crank out a theory-cranking theory.

Perhaps not coincidentally, most of the authors listed above have been invited to deliver TED talks. Elsewhere, I have suggested that there is something wrong with the TED talks. You can add one more to my list of reasons why: unwittingly or otherwise, TED feeds/celebrates/reinforces/legitimizes the commoditization of knowledge as a packaged, marketed and consumed product. Knowledge doesn’t have to be right; it just has to look right.

Go to any big-box store and look at the heaps of shining books and look at all the claims implicit in their titles. Seven steps to a new this or that. Learn the secrets of one thing or another. Discover why things are the way they are. We may think we sail an orthodox sea, but there’s a Gnostic undertow. We all crave a secret knowledge that will pull our lives into order and make our chaos explainable. Feel the crackling spine as you break open a new book and scan the flyleaf. Isn’t it a delicious feeling? You ask yourself: Will this be the one? Will this be the book that really pulls things together? It can’t be, of course. The logic of the market dictates that you must always be disappointed, otherwise you wouldn’t buy any more books.

In my world, there are no grand theories; there are only interpretations. They are helpful for a time. They lend perspective. They offer me a language to give expression to my experience. In time, they lose their usefulness and I must look elsewhere. Most experience sits outside grand theories. My grandmother’s gout is at least as important to her as Chris Anderson’s Long Tail. And Michael’s psychotic obsession has far more relevance to him than Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine. These experiences may never be capable of being swept up within a grand theory, but I’m convinced that a compassionate view of life must give them at least as much weight as any great idea. And so I will continue to blog in my scatter-shot manner. If something I write interests you, that’s fine. And if something I write doesn’t interest you, that’s fine too.

Part Four

Poetry - A Special Case?

IS POETRY A SPECIAL CASE?

Is poetry a special case? Do the usual practices of reading and interpreting apply when the words form stanzas instead of sentences?

Traditionally, at least in the popular imagination, poetry straddled the sacred and profane, not quite as authoritative as scripture, but numinous enough to shroud itself in a special status. And poets themselves were priestlike in their access to spiritual wisdom and magic wordcraft. However, as it has done to religion, the modern world has subjected poetry to a withering demystification. Both the poet and her words have been stripped of their authority and, much like the religious, they have been shoved to the margins of our culture.

Fiction has fared better, or at least the kind of fiction that critic, James Wood, describes as commercial realism. This is the sort of writing you’re apt to see on the New York Times bestseller list. It’s writing as product. Book as commodity. It moves units and keeps the publishing industry in lucre. However, there is a certain sameness to it. The dictates of the market have produced a literary ossification which, in more charitable moments, we might call a convention. Typically, it offers us a straightforward read with characters who behave according to a “realistic” psychology and whose dialogue “rings true”. The narrative is strictly linear and the plot (ironically) follows a Christian typos of fall, atonement and redemption.

Because poetry refuses to (or cannot) follow the rational demands of commercial realism, it loses out on the market machinery that delivers the poetry product from its manufacturers to its consumers. This has two consequences for poetry in the modern world. First, poetry readers are more engaged than other kinds of readers because they have to work to find (and understand) poetry. Second, because poetry necessarily happens outside market logic, poets are not beholden to it. There’s no such thing as a “successful” poet. This frees poets. With nothing to lose, poets can experiment. Not all experiments yield good poetry. Nevertheless, some of the freshest and most original writing comes from our poets. More importantly, with nothing to lose, poets can speak with a prophetic voice, challenging the machinery which excludes them, and challenging the wrongs that are necessarily attendant upon such power.

While we tend to think that poetry is a special case and therefore requires special interpretive tools to crack its obscure exterior, and while we tend to blame a demystifying modernity for persuading us that the interpretive project is pointless in any event since it engages us with irrational unreasonable texts, nevertheless, I’m inclined to think that poetry’s specialness is illusory. The problem isn’t that poetry is a tough nut to crack. The problem is that an ideology of the marketplace—the ideology that gives us commercial realism and the book as commodity—is an anaerobic organism. It can only thrive in an imaginative vacuum, an environment expunged of those ideas and their supporting vocabularies that would render poetry not simply accessible, but primally necessary.

Poetry is not a special case, but the world has made its defence a special vocation. And so, in answer to that call, I offer the beginnings of a defence by presenting contemporary poetry that matters precisely because it speaks outside the vocabulary of power.

BEYOND EXPLANATION

A friend of mine once said to me: Your poems are so much better when you explain them.

That statement took me by surprise. It presumes many things, most notably:

a) some of the pieces I write qualify as poems (at times, a questionable presumption);

b) my poems (or any poems for that matter) require explanation; and

c) my poems (or any poems for that matter) are capable of being explained.

After a person reads a poem, the first question she asks is: what does it mean? Readers want to explain it. Sometimes I oblige my readers and they respond as my friend did, suggesting that I have made myself accessible, a quality that is much admired.

We tend to think of reading as an advanced form of cryptography. At least that’s the default approach for a rational soul like me. The poet has a thought or feeling he wishes to communicate, so he takes that thought or feeling and wraps it in a coded packet called a poem. He sends his packet out to his loyal reader who decodes the poet’s poem to reveal the thought or feeling which can then be imprinted upon the reader’s mind or heart, more or less as the poet intended.

Like a cryptographer, the reader may crack the code by relying on a “key”—what Renaissance poets used to call a “conceit.”  It may be a statement like:

“The X is a symbol of …”

“The theme is …”

“The X really stands for …”

“The imagery evokes …”

Or the reader may be able to guess at an appropriate key if she is an experienced reader of poetry.

I note that the For Dummies series of books has produced a Poetry For Dummies book. It functions like a Swiss Army Knife of poetic keys—a tool to crack 95% of the world’s poems. It’s intended for people who think it would be good for them to cultivate a taste for poetry but lack a basic vocabulary to talk about the experience. High school English classes try to accomplish the same thing: imagery, symbol, metaphor, simile, meter, stanza, form, rhyme, rhythm, voice. These words are the vocabulary of explanation. They point to the keys that crack the code. Northrop Frye used this cryptographic conceit to describe the process of finessing meaning from a much longer poem—the Bible—when he wrote The Great Code.

I think it’s fair to say that all poets, at least early on in their writing, parallel the reader’s desire for explanation. They begin the process of writing a poem by asking questions like: “What do I want to communicate?”  “What is the point I’m trying to make?”  “What kind of feeling am I trying to evoke?”  This self-consciousness often leaks into the poetry.

Every poet writing in this inaccurately named postmodern world of ours goes through a phase of self-aware writing—the poem about writing a poem. I’ve done it. More than once. It rarely makes for good poetry but it seems to be a necessary step on the path to good poetry.

However, this is not the self-consciousness I care to address. Rather than the “Look at me; I’m a poem.” brand of self-consciousness, I’m after something subtler: a “Here is a coded packet; enclosed are some keys you’ll find helpful” brand of self-consciousness. The poet may write a rich and complex piece, but the poet embeds little signposts and hints along the way to ensure that the reader receives the intended message. For reference, here’s an egregious example I discovered yesterday in a novel titled The Other Sister by Lola Lemire Tostevin:

Again, Lena knocked on her head with her fists, a gesture she repeated whenever she wanted to convey how hermetically sealed the past was, as insulated from the outside world and from the present as if trapped behind barbed wire. [Italics added]

The portion indicated in italics ought to have been deleted by the editor. It is all explanation and already implied by the character’s act of knocking her head with her fists.

The desire to explain is a tendency I chalk up to anxiety and to attachment. The poet is afraid of being misunderstood. The poet is attached to a conviction that meaning is—or at least ought to be—a fixed point in a floating world. This reflects an idealism that may well have political consequences. Conversely, some of our best known political poetry—protest songs like “We shall overcome”—may also be laments for the inadequacy of language, for its eternal failure to create the immediacy needed to penetrate the differences which seem to keep us at war with one another.

I think that if a poet is to progress, then he must overcome the fear of being misunderstood and he must relinquish his attachment to the impossible ideal of explanation. We never look at our children and ask: “What is your meaning?”  Nor do we stand in front of a century-old maple and say: “Please explain yourself.”  We recognize our children as wonders in their own right and, if we have any feeling at all, we recognize ancient trees as numinous beings. The demand for meaning and explanation becomes irrelevant—maybe even incoherent.

Let me offer two examples to illustrate the difference between the poem as explanatory fetishism and the poem as numinous being. The first examples come from the volume titled The Sentinel by 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize winner, A.F. Moritz. Professor Moritz is an academic and is in the business of providing explanations:

… here I sit

decades later, maybe eons, I don’t know,

like a smudged paper rubbed to brittle thinness. The former marks on it

indeed are gone, almost, but the slightest stroke

would now tear through, so nothing

ever is written there. But surely it’s evil

to stay a blank like this …

(from Childish Willow)

And again:

I don’t want a memorial of love

that someday another man or woman will see,

opening a book or wandering under a hill,

and say: “Of him, we learn his name, and she…

he left her blanker still-

whether it was through the error of restraint

or through how little art can do or will,

who knows? In any case this, so faint,

blank almost, is their memorial,

that we can only make what may please us of.”

I don’t want a memorial of love.

(Memorial)

While the meanings of these passages lie elsewhere, nevertheless they anchor themselves in the act of writing themselves into being.

With Crabwise to the Hounds, Jeramy Dodds was shortlisted for the same prize, but lost. Consider the poem titled Boogaloo:

At every fete,

when the ass of a balloon opens,

we follow its tune, for whoever

that failing balloon brushes

becomes immune to voodoo.

You and whose doll, I knew not,

walked the churchyard then stopped

to cram a hairpin into its burlap.

I did not fold, but someone somewhere

cupped his loins.

We are only allowed to live

due to some colossal misunderstanding.

In rec rooms across this land

perpetual galas rage, throngs

of ball-gowned survivalists

scan skyward, arms spread

for breath-propelled balloons

that lap pristine ceilings.

Or until our effigies of each other drop

tears that teem like a sea of chandeliers.

Dodds demands no explanation and offers few clues. It is what it is. While Dodds is, at times, self-reflexive, as are we all, most of his writing tends to be self-effacing, allowing the poem to reveal itself on its own terms. (This is why I believe the wrong man won the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize.)

Among the best examples of what I call numinous poetry is Roo Borson’s Short Journey Upriver Toward Osheida, which I have discussed here. I have no idea what her work means. I have no explanations. But whenever I read her, it feels like I’m sitting beside cool running water. From a poem called, appropriately enough, River:

All night the miseries of others

gnawing at our bones. But dreams

are only dreams, unless they’re the dead:

elaborate in autumn’s gold frame, or those resonant

kitchen sounds that let us know we’re loved. Tea,

wheat, sand, water, paper, gold—a life in which,

if you pause, you can hear the dust settling,

in which summer nears winter and disappears,

each seems the only condition possible,

candid while it lasts.

Her words walk along beside me like an old friend, meaning-filled, not because they tell me anything, but because they accompany me on my journey.

An analogy comes to me from my friend who claims not to understand poetry but likes mine when I explain it to him. He also claims he doesn’t know any jokes save one. Here is the joke:

Q: What is the difference between a duck?

A: One of its legs are both the same.

I shocked him by laughing until I nearly peed my pants.   I don’t know why I found it so funny.   It doesn’t make any sense. Nevertheless, I think I cemented our friendship when I laughed at his stupid joke. Now, the joke has acquired meanings that extend beyond the limits of its (nonsensical) words: it is a marker on the path of a friendship, something we can return to as we venture on our journey.

Poetry is like that.

THE CERTAINTY DREAM

There’s a traditional view of how a poem relates to the world that has been with us for almost 2,500 years. This view is a reflection of an equally traditional view of how our world is organized. Although we’d like to describe ourselves as up-to-the-minute advanced scientific creatures, this ancient view is still with us in subtle ways.

The view looks like this: our world is organized as a hierarchy. At the top of the hierarchy is a full-on transcendental reality. This is the heightened apprehension of “things as they really are” that we would be able to see if, with Plato, we could crawl out of our caves, or if, with St. Paul, we could let the scales fall from our eyes, or if, with William Blake, we could cleanse the doors of our perception and see the world as it really is—infinite.

But because we live in caves and our eyes are covered in scales and the doors of our perception are murky, the world we inhabit looks ordinary and dull. The table we eat at has a solidity to it, but it’s plain, and the people we jostle on city streets are solid enough, but they aren’t terribly interesting. Ours is the tangible world of everyday life. It is a diminished world. Only on rare occasions does this diminished world crack open and let in some of Leonard Cohen’s light.

And then there is the poem. It is our heroic effort to cope with the diminished circumstances of our real-world living. I say ‘heroic’ because our poems inevitably fail but we write them anyways. They come from the struggles of finite beings who occupy the real world of solid bodies. They are necessarily less than their authors, and so, like their authors, they are a diminishment.

The poem’s value, like that of any art, comes not from anything that inheres in the poem, but from its role as placeholder in a cosmic syllogism: a poem is to the world as the world is to transcendental reality. In its role as placeholder, the poem directs our attention to higher things. The chart below illustrates this relationship. It looks like an inverted pyramid. It shows the conative process in which the wide open reality of “life, the universe, and everything” is reduced to our feeble poetic expressions.

You don’t have to believe this, of course.

There are competing accounts of a poem’s place in the grand scheme of things. One such account is implied by Descartes’ view that the only thing we can know for certain is that we are thinking things. The only verifiable reality is the interior reality of mental processes. That allows us to redraft the chart above. We could say that the transcendental, the solid world, and the poem, are all mental processes called perceptions and therefore all have the same value. Rather than displaying them hierarchically, we can display them as occupying separate unrelated spheres or as occupying a single jumbled sphere called the mind. However we choose to represent them, it’s fair to say that, on this view, the poem is no longer a diminishment of anything. It is the traces of a mental reality, and while not real in itself, a poem is no less real than a rock, say, or a soul, because they aren’t real either.

Another account of a poem’s place in the world comes from science. When I speak of science, I speak of a materialistic discipline that tries to describe phenomena. If I were to place science on the diagram above, I would place it in the middle among the “Solid Objects in the Real World.”  It would treat the “Transcendental Realm of Dreamy Stuff” as phenomena that have simply been misdescribed and properly belong among the “Solid Objects.”   And a poem is simply a misguided attempt at explaining phenomena—like a bad theory or speculation over a pitcher of beer.

The problem with these alternate accounts is that poems have a nasty habit of leaping outside their own words and becoming objects in their own right. Poems are like trick balloons that want to rise outside themselves and float through “Solid Objects in the Real World” and on up to the “Transcendental Realm of Dreamy Stuff.”  Poems don’t know their proper place.

This is rather a long introduction to a review of poetry but, what the hell, it’s my blog and I’ll do as I please. What I hope my introduction has done is to map out some of the terrain that Kate Hall explores in her first collection, The Certainty Dream. It is a terrain shared by philosophers, especially epistemologists, people who investigate what it is we can claim to know for a certainty. As the title to Hall’s collection suggests, she is playing with classic questions about perception, consciousness and knowing. She doesn’t behave like a philosopher because she doesn’t stake any ground. She doesn’t claim to be a Cartesian or an advocate of science. She’s a poet and so can leave claims unstaked.

When most poets gather up their poems from scattered publications to produce a single volume, the result often looks like a scattered gathering of poems. Hall’s collection is remarkable for appearing to proceed in the opposite direction, as if all the poems were written first for a single coherent work, then bits were carved off and sent away to appear in journals. As a result, there are some clear threads that run through nearly every poem to give the collection a tautness. Dominant images include:

• containers

• vehicles

• miniatures

• birds (especially mynah birds but also blackbirds and crows)

• recursion and paradox (e.g. people swallowing themselves)

Containers

There are bathtubs, ponds and dinghies, a basin and a submarine, body bags and sarcophagi, skin, a petri dish, houses, moving boxes, a “bomb-proof concrete room/with twelve locks on the door”, a pear grown inside a bottle, “the old blue steamer trunk”, suitcases, the belly, a “giant domed ceiling”, cups, a vat, a jewellery box, a glass box, and a “shapely hole.”   In a poem titled “The Shipping Container” Hall notes that “It’s true, the container / has great aesthetic value but I was really hoping / for a free watch with a rechargeable battery or / at least a better kind of nothingness.”  This raises a question about poems. Are they containers for meaning? Do they have an aesthetic consequence apart from their contents? Or, to put these questions in terms of the diagram I created above, do poems rise up from their diminished status to a position of substance in their own right? Can words jumbled together, become something greater than the sum of their parts, like Ezekial’s dry bones waiting for breath?

Vehicles

Containers can be vehicles too. A container can hold information, but a container that moves can also transmit information. And so we encounter living bodies and bathtub races and trains, model boats and elephants, the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, toy dump trucks, a blue minivan and ships burning in the harbour. We see a clear correlation between vehicles and the transmission of information. For example, in “The Sun Library”: “The 11:40 train departs, / arrives 16:17. All the time / I’m travelling, I’m at a loss / for information.”  And in “Remind me what the light is for” we have a brilliant encapsulation of the state of poetry in 2010:

Dear occupants of the moving boxes,

there are days when I forget

you have to live here too, in cardboard

cubes, tossed inside with lamps

that do not work. Everything is labelled but

because we’ve reused the boxes, the objects listed

are not what’s inside. So, occupants, I am losing

faith.

People have lost their faith in poetry too. Although we sometimes use poems like containers to convey information, the information that they convey is about as useful as lamps that don’t work. And the forms we learned in school are like mislabelled boxes. If “[t]he mysteries are in need of / continual rephrasing” but we allow the mysteries to ossify in a tired curriculum and worn-out scripture, then of course people will lose their faith.

In another “container” image, Hall draws on Richard Dawkins: “Evolution is about the genes / manipulating the bodies they ride in.”  Is that what a poem is? A body that carries coded information? Or, in the end, is a decoding simply impossible? As her book comes to a close, Hall writes: “I imagine myself / at an art gallery looking at installations / and not pretending there can be / any sort of understanding.”

Miniatures

Many of the poems feature small things. The world is shrinking. “You must have gotten smaller to fit yourself / into that space.”  There are birds “whom I forced into a small fragmented area”. “It’s scary to loom this large in / the world of tiny experiences.”  She writes of “shrinking the sarcophagus / until it’s the size of a small jewellery box.”

Is poetry an act of diminishment? If you use poetry to convey decipherable meanings, do you sacrifice something as you squish those meanings into their tiny containers? Or can we break poetry out of that old hierarchical model that treats it as an inferior kind of knowing?

Birds

I’m not sure what to make of the birds. Crows are traditionally seen as symbols of death or desolation or loneliness. But here, the primary bird is the mynah bird. Maybe the birds here are like mislabelled boxes. Whatever they might be will only reveal itself by watching them in their own habitat. Or maybe it’s a pointless exercise. As Hall says in the poem which gives the book its title: “Certainty could be folded / into a featherless bird.”  This echoes Hall’s “Dream in which I apologize to the birds” “those whom I made / strings of words / featherless”. If we try too hard to nail down a meaning that we can affix to the bird, we’ll end up stripping the bird of the very thing it needs to be a bird.

Or maybe the bird is a shape-shifter. In “Dressed-up Dream”:

mynah morphs into crow

stands for nightingale

don’t assume abandonment

he needs a new name

not being himself anymore

and builds a nest from anything that’s available. At other times, the mynah has its tongue clipped. And at the end “this became the dream his dream in which I did not allow him to speak / and the dream in which I imagined him speechless before me”.

A bird capable of speech that is rendered speechless? Maybe that’s like a poem capable of being a container that transmits information. Maybe there’s nothing to understand in a poem any more than there’s something to understand in the speech of a mynah bird. A bird simply is. In the same way, maybe a poem must be left to be whatever a poem may be.

Recursion and paradox

The poems are riddled with recursive images that drag us into paradoxical games. Given Hall’s preoccupation with consciousness, I don’t think this is such an arcane thing. After all, consciousness is a recursive and paradoxical phenomenon. We are all beings who are aware of ourselves as beings who are aware of ourselves. In “Dream in which the dream is scaled to size”, “you are about to swallow / the whole world with you / in it”. This is an image which appears several times.

In “Overnight a horse appeared” she presents an interesting variation by imagining herself crawling back inside herself. The “she” doing this imagining is probably the poem itself as a kind of reified character: the poem is the character who is the subject matter of the poem. The poem warns us of itself. It’s a Trojan horse. If we fall prey to its ruse, who knows what damage it will do. “For my horse and me, / it hardly matters. Though it will matter for you: / how you decide to read me or / whether you do.”  The ruse is to trick me into believing the poem is meaningful. The paradox is that if I discover that the poem is a ruse, then it will have becoming meaningful and will have succeeded in tricking me despite the fact that it failed to trick me.

Then there are the mynah birds who “pluck / themselves out of existence.”  Maybe this engages us in a similar paradox: the poem succeeds when it disappears.

Kate Hall’s The Certainty Dream is fun and interesting and challenging. I sense in it—and this is an entirely personal sense—a quiet yearning to create more poetry in which the self-conscious poet grows still. The “mynah dreams himself into a statue”. When that happens: “who will call out / and calling out who will answer”.

Perhaps these are questions which should remain unanswered, or simply answered by the fact of more poetry.

THE WANTON SUBLIME

In her third volume of poetry, The Wanton Sublime, Anna Rabinowitz creates an extended meditation upon the Annunciation—the moment that starts everything in traditional Christian believing—the moment the angel Gabriel appears to a young Mary and tells her she’s going to be the mother of God. As a protestant male, I may not be best positioned to review such poetry. Moreso given that I belong to a denomination which is comfortable ordaining openly gay clergy. In the faith community I frequent, concerns about the Annunciation have been tossed into a dusty remainder bin, and its controversies passed long ago. Why should I care what women are saying now about the Annunciation? Then I look to my daughter, thirteen years old, confirmed only two months ago, blithely ignorant of the hard-won concessions her mother and grandmothers struggled to secure, all too willing to waive rights whose price she cannot estimate. Once, Mary was (and often continues to be) held up by traditional religious leaders as a model of submissive piety to be emulated by good Christian women everywhere. But women like Anna Rabinowitz offer different understandings of this model. In fact, she herself serves as a model of how women can think and can interpret ancient stories in fresh ways that take account of realities which would otherwise go ignored if viewed only through the lens of piety’s idealism. These are the messy realities of bodies and sexuality and gender and reproduction, the fact of power and its exercise both to raise people up and to beat them down. As a model, Rabinowitz has the further advantage of a balanced view. She is not an iconoclast. Undergirding even her most searching words is an unmistakable reverence.

Approaching the volume’s themes: the question of interruption appears in the first lines of the first poem: “It begins in a far meadow, a bright room, a hillside thick with time / A woman in a field of flowers interrupted and carried away”. Traditionally, the messiah is figured as the insertion of God into history, making the timeless subject to time. But to average people (like Mary before Gabriel’s appearance), the insertion stops the expected flow of time. Is it right that God should demand of a woman that she drop everything in order to gestate a heavenly child? Rabinowitz uses different devices to convey this notion of interruption. She breaks up lines so that the eye is interrupted and has to move across the page to complete the thoughts. She also suggests the image of a reading Mary, part way through a book, forced by distraction to look up from the page. I am an obsessive compulsive reader; I hate distraction; and so such a picture is highly accessible to me.

This image signals a second important thematic strand drawn through most of these poems—the relationship between our believing and our words. Certainly within traditional Christianity, the importance of language is a given: John says that the messiah is the Logos, the Word. This spawned an entire branch of theological discourse that continues to produce new insights. In fact, in their preoccupation with literary theory, postmodern theologians have had a field day with the idea of the Word and its place in current exegetical practice.

Rabinowitz has her fun too. In an early poem she introduces “rod of I” and “round of O”, letters become phallus and womb. In a later poem “Cloak, Perfect Cloud,” the I and O merge to become Io, a lesser goddess of the Greek pantheon who, like Mary, had a bit of an encounter with a supreme deity. In this case, Zeus did the deed while cloaked in the whiteness of a cloud: “Desire snares her in its stricken cold–mist net, / taboos the sun from shedding light on dark.” This turns traditional imagery on its head (or perhaps on its back): divine consummation is supposed to bring light to the world, but this consummation casts the world, not in darkness, but in obscurity. And with the line, “Thunder, perfect Inundation,” we have an interesting allusion to a text from the Nag Hammadi library, notorious for its very human account of the seminal events of the Christian tradition. Elsewhere, Rabinowitz makes it clear that she ties the Mary story to other Earth mother goddess fertility traditions that sprang up in the Mediterranean basin long before early Christians reworked the script.

What about Mary’s freedom to choose? “Is this virginity enslaved,” asks Rabinowitz. Is it “a freedom without will / a freedom named obedience”? There is a paradox at work in the Annunciation: the liberating force of submitting to duty. On one view, God is just another oppressive man putting a woman in her place; but on another view, God vaults Mary into a deeper participation. Which is it? Rabinowitz gives the answer in the title to the poem that puts the question: “THE LIGHT CANNOT BE EXPLAINED”. This line recurs throughout the text. In another poem, she asks: “do they know / meaning need not be known / NOR THE LIGHT EXPLAINED”? Explanation is an exercise of power. Poetry, like scripture, can only be explained by doing violence to the text, by casting out nuance, by insisting upon either/or. But poetry, like scripture, is a place where paradox thrives. Try to fix its meaning, try to impose a neat coherence upon it, and the words fall dead.

Rabinowitz has a couple of habits which I find distracting. She enjoys playing free association games which connect disparate ideas through alliteration and rhyme. “Robed in R / wrapped in R / rapt by R / entrapped / and captive there”. This kind of wordplay is not to my taste, but maybe it works here. After all, this volume celebrates the interruption, the dislocation, the emergence of newness from the unexpected; and that is precisely what free association aims at. So I will reserve judgment on this matter. As well, she occasionally uses words which evoke a nostalgia for the Romantic poets. The word “alas” makes an appearance, and the collection’s title tempts me to place it on the shelf next to my Wordsworth. Maybe she really does have a flash of the Romantic in her. But a shifting sensibility may well work in this context, underscoring once again the paradoxical ground she treads between traditional believing and the fresh paths that women have found it necessary to lay down for themselves. So once again I will reserve judgment on the matter.

As one might expect, The Wanton Sublime speaks most directly to disaffected women from Christian faith traditions who struggle to reconcile received notions of believing with freer modes of being in the world. But that would circumscribe the book’s audience too narrowly. It speaks more widely to anyone who cares about the way words intersect with belief.

PRESENT TENSE

To the extent that we think about themes in contemporary writing (assuming themes even exist outside high school English classes) one of the most familiar themes to trouble the contemporary reader’s brain is alienation. There is social alienation reflected in accounts of loneliness and atomisation. There is existential alienation reflected in accounts of absurdity and loss of meaning. But we have given less thought to temporal alienation. Maybe the reason for our neglect is that we are too busy, caught up in the accelerating rush of faster processor speeds and the neoliberal idolatry of market efficiencies which betrays an “audacity with no time … to atone for our lives”. The idea of pausing to think about something seems so yesterday.

In her latest volume of poetry, Present Tense, Anna Rabinowitz faces squarely the matter of temporal alienation. Even the title deserves our pause. At first glance, it looks like a simple reference to simple grammar. We often write and think and speak in present tense. It is the mode of everyday commerce. But we readily see the double entendre, accentuated by the fact that the cover’s text is distorted: the present is tense. I interpret this (and the whole book for that matter) in two ways, one personal, the other, political.

Personal: the present is tense. Unless we have some cognitive deficit or psychosis, we do our living in present time, and that fact alone bears within it the seeds of dread. This dread is the lingering trauma of consciousness, “reality as a triumph of open wounds.”  But I would contend that it is a violence inflicted on us not, as some experts claim, in the moment of childbirth, but in the subsequent gift of language; it is in the acquisition of language that we discover ourselves as subjects alienated from the world we inhabit. Every time we read, it’s like picking at a scab. We relive the violence of that first alienating trauma when we discovered how words impose a distance between us and our world.

Political: the present is tense. The present age is dominated by feelings of dread. We fear difference, change, infectious diseases, same-sex marriage, government, violent crime, atheists, earthquakes, terrorists, tsunamis, climate change, asteroids, drug cartels, pesticides, TNC’s, GMO’s, NGO’s, Somali pirates, copyright pirates, bottled water. In the political context, we experience the anxiety of temporal alienation as a collective forgetfulness. We deny our history, or we remember only the convenient bits. That allows us to live like there’s no tomorrow, consuming, invading, dominating, destroying.

Our personal encounter with present tenseness can be expressed in innocuous terms: we say that language mediates experience to us. Mediation is a polite term that makes us feel comfortable. But when we describe our political encounters with present tenseness, polite terms disappear. Things get nastier when we roam in packs. Maybe the kindest term we can apply to ourselves is “denial.”  As political creatures, we create a buffer between consciousness and experience which is called denial. Maybe a more accurate term is “lying.”

Poetry is one of the few tools we have to confront these distortions and to effect a kind of redemption for our language. My use of the word “redemption” is deliberate. Rabinowitz draws heavily upon the judeo-christian religious tradition which imagines an historical trajectory that launches itself from out of the deep and ends at the end of time itself with the apocalypse—the revelation of cosmic truths. Apocalypsis is the answer to the limitations of a language (logos) which both mediates and lies. Midway between Genesis and Revelation, there is the incursion of the eternal in human history. Call it Christ. Call it grace. Call it redemption. Call it whatever you like. It comes down to a single simple meaning: all our arrogant scrabbling within history must face its answer outside of history.

In a way, Present Tense is a sequel to Rabinowitz’s previous collection, The Wanton Sublime. There, the religious myth lurking in the background was the story of the annunciation, the declaration to Mary that she had conceived the Son of God. In that collection, the focus was upon anticipation; in this, the focus is upon disappointment. The writers of the Gospel stories believed that, following the death of Jesus, he would return to them in a prophetic fulfillment of history; and, most importantly, they believed it would happen in their generation. It didn’t. The promised peace ended for many in violent death. That tale of disappointment lurks in the background of Present Tense. The myths may have changed. Instead of the Pax Romana, we have the Pax Americana. Instead of an historical arc leading to apocalypsis, we have cherished tales of moral and technological progress leading to mastery of our world. Nevertheless, the disappointment today is as palpable as it was 2,000 years ago. The myth of the Pax Americana came crashing down on 9/11. And the tales of progress are indistinguishable from those insidious lies called advertising.

But Present Tense is not really an exercise in the deconstruction of Christian mythology or in demystification. It is more an expression of atonement, or at least of a desire to walk that path. In this age, it is problematic to be a conscientious American. By virtue of citizenship, Rabinowitz shares in the national grief of 9/11, but is likewise complicit in the atrocities her country has visited upon the rest of the world as it vents its rage. Atonement begins with confession. The first matter for confession is the bare fact of complicity. In “Anna Speaks,” Rabinowitz imagines a time when “Anna” threw a knife at her brother. She can’t remember why she did it, “Just that I was mad as hell, / The blade gleamed on the table, / And he was there.”  Who is her brother? She doesn’t say. Maybe he lives in Iraq. In an analogous scenario, she imagines a conversation between Freud and Einstein which opens with Freud posing the puzzle: “Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?”  As a member of the Manhattan Project, how did Einstein live with his complicity in the atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Do just war rationales from WW II have any bearing on America’s conduct today? Did they even work in 1945?

A confession of complicity naturally prompts the question: complicity in what? How about violence? There are the “Notes: Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistant Sources” and an “Addendum” to the Notes which draw upon two declassified CIA manuals offering instructions on interrogation techniques that were in use even during the Bush administration. It is written in the second person, addressed to us, as if we are students learning the finer points of this curious art. The manual tells us that “Speedy onset of anxiety is of great benefit to you in fulfilling your mission.”  In the present age, we all experience a speedy onset of anxiety. It is the affliction of our age. We all are subject to such interrogation techniques—the inducement of anxiety to produce a desired response; whenever we watch TV ads or pass billboards that remind us of all our physical infirmities, from yellow teeth to unmanageable hair to leaky bladders, we feel an urge to run to the store and spend money. The “Note” concludes: “You are in the service of your country. / You are helping to make the world a better place.”  How much longer this volume would have been if, at the time of its writing, Rabinowitz had access to the Wikileaks cables!

Or how about the acrostic on “A Rose By Any Other Name” which opens: “A war by any other name would smell as / Rank as Desert Storm … “? While violence can be overt and physical, some of the worst violence we do is with our words. There is the blunt force trauma of name-calling, or its more subtle cousin, the euphemism:

Annihilate all terrorists in the plot, injecting Democracy

Nearer The Front Lines where nouns still wade about, before

Yardsticks pummel our brains with questions about the Measure

Of Naming.

Language is deployed nearer the front lines. As we have already observed, torture is merely “interrogation”. This freedom we bring at the end of a gun is called “Democracy.”  And destruction is reduced to “consumption” while dissent is elevated to “terror.”

But perhaps the greatest violence in language is not found in the manipulation of meaning, but in its decontextualization or what I called, at the outset, temporal alienation. We deny words their provenance as the first step in suppressing the stories they would otherwise form. In Present Tense, this crops up from time to time as a lament: “If only we could costume memories. But our headmasters refuse to learn from old clothes.”  And again: “Even the defunct deserves a place in the commotion of the soul.”  Or again: “Testimony is a cryptic relic deformed by the violence of authority.”  A similar lament prompted Howard Zinn to offer an account of America which honours the stories of its underclass rather than the stories of those in authority. And it is a lament which has acquired greater urgency as factions on the far right seek to impose revisionist histories on everything from fossil records to founding fathers.

Let me close with an irony offered in the voice of Chief Seattle in “Chief Seattle Speaks”:

Your religion

Was written on tablets of stone

By the iron finger of an angry God

Lest you forget

In contrast, the traditions and dreams which guided Chief Seattle’s people were “written in the hearts of our people.”  The irony is that tablets of stone have failed to prevent us from forgetting. Although a volume of poetry is a far cry from a tablet of stone, there is the temptation on the part of readers to treat its contents as neatly contained artifacts which they can relegate to a forgotten shelf. Resist that temptation. These are words which deserve to be written on your hearts.

THE PATIENT FRAME

In the summer of ’83, with one year of English Lit studies under my belt (or wherever you put English lit studies), I was walking along Bloor Street when I saw Ajay Heble leaning against a building and selling a chapbook. I knew Ajay from high school, so I stopped to ask about the chapbook and bought a copy. He explained that his chapbook was an example of a school of thought, a theoretical approach, a literary practice, a something-or-other. He called it objective minimalism. The idea of objective minimalism is that you write as if you’re standing behind a sheet with a hole cut into it and all you can see of the world is what you can see through the hole; things pass in front of the hole and you record their passage. That’s it. You don’t try to imagine where these things have come from or where they go. You don’t speculate about how one thing might be related to another thing. All you do is record what you see.

I remembered Ajay’s theory of objective minimalism as I read “Home Movies, 8 mm,” the poem which gives Steven Heighton the title for his latest book of poetry, Patient Frame. Heighton imagines watching old home movies flickering across the screen. The movies have been shot by someone young, someone impatient who wants to get it all in. The person with the camera jitters around so that people pass in and out of the frame, but watching years later, the poet wishes the frame had lingered so he could pause. In the poem, Heighton offers a list of all the things remembered in these films, “the patient frame.”  And then he writes:

I know memory

what these reels were meant to fortress,

aims the same fickle lens, leaving gaps and blurs

in the record, but what of the eye itself, as it glides

over a lifetime’s loves the same way—careless

and rushed, a manic amateur—

and the little reel clicks down inside?

If I could start over, I would stare and stare.

I remember feeling skeptical about Ajay’s prose pieces and their tunnel vision—mostly because they didn’t tell a story but presented only tiny slices of a wide wide world. I wonder if maybe Ajay knew better than me what was coming. Now, tiny slices are all I have. Heighton’s “minimalism” is even more poignant because his tiny slices of the world refuse to sit still, not like the hole in a sheet that hangs in place. He wishes he could “reach back / and brace the hand holding the camera that pans / away, again, with a young hand’s / impatience to contain all”. The tone is elegiac: if only we had known then how fleeting these memories would be, we would have paused in the patient frame. He revisits this wish for patience in “Ballad of the Slow Road” where he calls on the reader to “learn to love the wait / till the love is in your marrow / and the wait is no delay, but more / a seasoning of the will—”  The unstated suggestion is that poems ought to be subject to the same demands. We want our poems to “stare and stare”; we don’t want a “fickle lens.”

Of all the things Heighton stares and stares at, the thing he fixes most intensely is the matter of justice. He wants to know why bad people sometimes thrive while the just are routinely crucified. He frames the question in the opening poem, “Another of the Just: Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, My Lai, 1968”, which marks the death of the only man to intervene when U.S. soldiers massacred hundreds of civilians in South Viet Nam. Why should Thompson die of cancer with “lynch mail, roadkill, razored strays splayed” at his door as his reward for saving a child’s life, while William Calley, who raped and murdered women and children, had a life sentence commuted to three years of house arrest?

The poem concludes with:

Still, in the Agent

Orange skies, your archangelic contrail lingers—you

at the flightstick, bearing the one child. Forget the pen,

forget the sword: the strongest hands hold neither, but they hold.

Our old touchstones about pens and swords make no sense in the face of atrocities like this. We stand and stare as witnesses. We tend to think of witnessing as an adjunct to justice in the negative sense: the act of witnessing helps secure prosecution and punishment. But an honest witnessing has to acknowledge everything in the frame. In the case of the My Lai massacre, an honest witnessing has to include an act of moral courage. Heighton’s poem is particularly timely in light of stories emerging from Afghanistan and it reminds us to look with clear eyes that see everything in the frame.

Heighton returns to this in “Not The Kind To Die” which stares wide-eyed at James Von Brunn, white supremacist and Holocaust denier, who shot and killed an African-American guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. Although grievously injured in the attack, this 88-year-old man appeared to be on his way to a full recovery and declared that he was “not the kind to die”, raising the obvious question: “Why the hell not?”

In moral terms, this poem is more challenging than “Another of the Just” because it doesn’t offer a window on redemption (unless we include the fact that the victim held open the door for Von Brunn). The poem further challenges us with its uncomfortable reference to Ezra Pound. What are we to make of a literary giant who nevertheless inhabits a place of moral squalor? Does a poet not have a moral duty—much like a prophet—to hold power accountable? Or is there some aesthetic space that justifies poetry apart from its moral take on the world? “[M]aybe / There is no Karma?” Heighton observes (asks?) in reference to the Chief Inquisitor named Torquemada who died in luxury at the age of 83 after a life devoted to torture of the innocent.

In the elegiac piece “Outram Lake” for poet Richard Outram, Heighton approaches the problem from a different direction:

No one’s with you on the porch the bitter night

you submit yourself to winter, to wed,

with ice, your absence

to a buried wife’s, dying toward her

in a way that’s anaesthetic

and yet, in its simple dignity, aesthetic too—

that would matter to you—

Heighton plays on the fact that Outram’s name coincides with the name of a lake in British Columbia that was obliterated in a rock slide, “a jumbled slag / like dense, enigmatic wording.”  Even in the harsh indifference of a rock slide, we find an appeal to our aesthetic sensibility. But we don’t celebrate the rock slide for creating the beauty that stirs us. We don’t ascribe any kind of moral quality to the rock slide. It is what it is and we stare at it.

Heighton’s virtue is that he refrains from drawing conclusions. That is the patient frame. Through the lens of a poem, he observes closely everything that passes before him. There is space within the frame for both the just and the unjust.

At some point, a poem itself has to submit to the same kind of scrutiny. The best poems transcend evaluations like “good” and “bad” and simply are what they are, freed from the need of a justification. This is morally uncomfortable because it claims the legitimacy of space for fascist poetry. When Matthew says that god “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous,” it is in the context of a challenge: the moral life doesn’t demand from us simple choices; it demands that we create space in our hearts most especially for the things which repel us—the William Calleys and the James Von Brunns of the world. Presumably, a poetic life demands something analogous. If Matthew had been writing a gospel of poetry, he might have said something like: “the poet brings his vision to frame both the ugly and the beautiful, that which causes the reader to squirm and that which causes the reader to sit at ease.”

Part Five

Reading Law

COPYRIGHT AND THE RIAA

I fought the law … (but I can’t complete this sentence because the RIAA would sue me if I did.)

This is a review of two books which are essential reading in understanding one side of an important debate in American culture—the issue of copyright in the age of the internet and digital media. The books are:

Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity, by Siva Vaidhyanathan (New York University Press, 2001)

Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, by Lawrence Lessig (The Penguin Press, 2004).

Let me begin with two reflections. The first is the summer of ’82 as I experienced it. I had just finished high school and was working for the summer as a ride operator at Canada’s Wonderland. I met a girl who worked at the park running games. We went out. I drove to work in my father’s Oldsmobile with the windows rolled down, blaring the radio. During that summer, there was a string of hits on the radio—John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Jack & Diane,” ABC’s “The Look of Love,” Roxy Music’s “Avalon,” Alan Parson’s “The Eye in the Sky” … Even now, when I hear those songs, I am transported back to the summer of ’82 when I had a great time with friends, enjoyed a summer romance, drove my parents crazy. That music has become embedded in my memory. It has become inextricably tied to my sense of who I am. The second reflection is the summer of ’05, right now, watching as my children, now teenagers, have begun to lead lives just a little beyond my control, going to the Baskin Robbins on the corner to meet friends, going to movies, and, yes, going with friends to Canada’s Wonderland. They make their arrangements, not on the phone the way I did, but by texting. But like me, they draw powerful associations with music—“their” music. They listen to Red Hot Chili Peppers and Weezer and Coldplay and (which astonishes me) the Beatles. But they don’t listen to the radio. Instead, they listen to iTunes. And they email mp3 files to one another. Or email titles and then download them on Limewire or KDX. Or they burn them to CD’s or DVD’s and trade them or give them away.

Both reflections illustrate how one facet of our culture—music—creates strong associations which end up, through some organic process, becoming melded to our personal identity. This music is not “out there” as an object to be grasped for a time and then returned once we are done with it; this music is “our” music. And yet, as Lessig relates, the RIAA, representing American recording artists, has gone so far as to sue a 12 year old girl—she could be my daughter—for doing what any normal girl her age enjoys doing: playing “her” music. Both the RIAA and the 12 year old girl understand music as proprietary in some sense, but their understandings are wildly divergent. These divergent understandings of cultural “products” and the rights attached to such “products” is the subject under consideration by both Vaidhyanathan and Lessig. Both authors ask how the debate could have become so extreme in its polarization, how the stakes could have become so high (so that a 12 year old would have to surrender her savings of $2,000 in an out-of-court settlement) and what can be done to restore a sense of balance to the debate.

Vaidhyanathan makes it clear that he does not write about copyright from the lawyer’s perspective. Although he gives a highly readable and largely anecdotal account of the high points of American copyright law, his primary interest is as a social scientist. He wants to explore what culture means to us in its “written” forms and his concern for legal issues arises only to the extent that law impacts upon our evolving apprehension of those meanings. The greatest portion of his book is engaged in the task of deconstructing the notion of authorship. He sees today’s debate not as the consequence of opposed positions on the same issue, but as the consequence of the failure to recognize that different parties are talking about different issues. The powerful media lobbies hearken back to a notion of authorship which first arose in the Renaissance—a one-for-one correspondence between the creator and the created. The poem exists because the poet wrote the poem, and therefore, to the extent that the poem was the result of the poet’s effort, then the poet should be compensated for the use to which others put his poem.

This view was most acutely entrenched by the English Romantic poets. There is a natural alignment between English Romanticism and American individualism. They are cousins for whom Shakespeare is their grandfather. But there is another story of authorship deeply embedded in the story of American creativity—the Afro-American influence. Because blacks first came to America as slaves and because illiteracy was a deliberate part of their oppression, their earliest story-telling in America was oral histories. And alongside oral histories came varied forms of folk music whose descendants include gospel and the blues. It is notoriously difficult to trace authorship (in the traditional sense) for oral histories and folk music. As Muddy Waters said of his blues riffs, he got them “from the corn field.” And it is Afro-American culture which has, with the help of the internet, precipitated the current crisis of copyright law. The practices of borrowing and building upon the work of others, which are the foundations of hip hop, and scratch music and sampling, have attracted the full force of copyright law which takes no account of such “primitive” notions of authorship.

Vaidhyanathan’s book provides ample support for the contention that those who insist in the strict enforcement of copyright law for personal enrichment commit a grave cultural hubris. Authorship is always a collective effort and therefore the resulting property always belongs to everybody.

Lessig’s account concerns itself with more recent events, describing how big media interests have sought to entrench this cultural hubris as a hallmark of American copyright law. Like Vaidhyanathan, he argues passionately that a culture of permission (one in which I must ask permission to incorporate the work of others into my own creations) has a chilling effect upon creativity. For example, copyright law has always provided a fair use exception: there is a social utility in copying the work of others to encourage education, the free play of ideas central to democratic health, critical commentary, etc. But if even the threat of litigation will bankrupt an academic or a freelance journalist, then, in a litigious environment, it becomes safer to avoid the issue altogether. This, argues Lessig, is bad for the health of american academic institutions (resulting in what Allan Bloom has described as “The Closing of the American Mind”), it is bad for democratic institutions because it hampers open debate, and more generally, it is bad for American culture.

Indeed, since the publication of Free Culture, the Supreme Court has handed down the Grokster decision which renders the debate even more extreme and dangerous for those who wish to produce technologies which facilitate the dissemination of cultural works. The Supreme Court held that Grokster, the creator of a peer to peer file sharing protocol, was vicariously liable for copyright violations it facilitated through its technology even though it did not directly commit any copyright violations. As Lessig points out in the Sept/05 issue of Wired, Apple’s iPod is captured by the ruling and therefore should be illegal. But, since this whole issue is about money and power, it is unlikely that Apple will be affected (although it has eliminated the “Rip, Mix & Burn” tag from its advertising). Because this is about power and intimidation, it is not surprising that today the Wall Street Journal reports that a blogger faces a lawsuit for comments posted by readers.

However, the bleak state of American culture is not solely the consequence of a poorly nurtured legal structure; it further suffers from an increasing concentration of control over cultural “product” in the hands of a few vertically integrated media behemoths. Clearly, in many industries, Americans have benefitted enormously from economies of scale. Sometimes, bigger is better. But in the case of culture, there are values which cannot be quantified on any economic analysis. If, one day, a single company owns Penguin Books (which published Free Culture), my ISP and the host of my web domain, and if that company takes exception to my comments, then it will be in a position to take any number steps to censor my post while leaving me powerless to do anything about it. Freedom from censorship is a value which may well trump the degree of control demanded by big media.

Lessig proposes several measures to strike a reasonable balance between the need to compensate creativity (no artist should be a starving artist) and the need to promote the culture which is the breeding ground for all creativity in the first instance. He strikes this balance by limiting the duration of copyright to ensure that all works eventually pass into the public domain while those without commercial value pass more quickly. One of his proposals, the Creative Commons License, is a measure which any creative individual can adopt today. The Creative Commons License provides model licenses for many other jurisdictions.

The multi-jurisdictional nature of CC leads to the last issue: why should I, as a Canadian, care what two authors say about the state of copyright law in America?

First, American media conglomerates have powerful lobbies here in Canada and are trying to encourage an American-style prohibitionist copyright policy. Witness the efforts of Graham Henderson, entertainment lawyer and president of the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association). To date, Canadian politicians and judges alike have followed the counsel of caution. (Vaidhyanathan describes at lengths Mark Twain’s efforts to promote more “modern” copyright laws and cites his anger at Canadians for their leniency which, in his view, made Canada fertile ground for pirates. Sound familiar?)

Second, Canadians need to celebrate the differences. Historically, on just about every policy front, we have tended towards a socialized approach while leaving ideology at the door. A view of wider social responsibility has affected everything from taxation to delivery of health care and education. And so it is not surprising that authorship and the sacrosanct position of individuality has less of a footing on Canadian soil. We do aim to reward authorship, but our political leaning towards social responsibility mitigates against a one-for-one correlation between units of product sold and royalties. And so we have chosen to address the issue of “piracy” by taxing recordable media and distributing the proceeds to artists (not unlike the model for dealing with photocopying in public libraries). Naturally, big media intimates that this is the notion of a technologically illiterate back water. Personally, I think it is best described as different. And difference alone is never cause for criticism. Our difference is predicated upon slight cultural tweakings that have gone unnoticed south of the border. Our difference reflects an alternative understanding of authorship, an alternative understanding of how authorship should be rewarded, and an alternative understanding of social and political responsibility generally.

To date, even the CRIA has kept from suing 12 year old girls. So we must be doing something right.

EBOOKS AND PED

In debates about copyright and piracy, one hears a lot from copyright law advocates on one side (tough laws, digital rights management, enforcement with teeth), and cultural libertarians on the other (broad fair dealing provisions, open source, lenient enforcement). However, one hears little from economists. Sure, there are sweeping claims from the tough-on-piracy camp that illegal downloading costs the cultural sector billions in lost revenue. And there are equally sweeping claims from the free culture camp that piracy can be treated as a loss leader promotion ploy that, in fact, generates revenue. Viewed in isolation, both positions sound plausible. But viewed at some remove, I can’t help but sense that both camps exaggerate their claims about the economic consequences of an activity we have come to describe as piracy. Since I can’t trust either camp to represent itself honestly, I’m forced to figure things out all on my own.

I am not an economist (neither are the people embroiled in this debate). Nevertheless, I can recognize a bogus argument when I hear one, and I have a sufficient grasp of mathematical principles that I can understand basic economic concepts. At the very least, I can formulate pointed questions.

What interests me is the sudden shift from analog to digital media in the publishing industry. Newspaper, magazine and book publishers are in a tizzy. They are uncertain how to negotiate the tectonic changes before them and so look for guidance to the music business which has undergone analogous changes. While the comparison is natural, it is important to note differences between their respective media. Otherwise the comparison is unhelpful and may be downright misleading. This is where the discipline of economics can provide a useful tool. It reveals what I regard as an essential difference between digital music and digital publishing—demand elasticity.

(Note: while I resent the application of words like product and consumption to books, I’ll save my resentment for another time and resort to the terms in which a neoclassical economist might discuss this issue.)

Price elasticity of demand (PED) is the variability in the demand for a product as the price for that product changes. Yawn. I know, I know, but bear with me. There’s an interesting point coming. I promise. Typically, when the price for a product goes up, demand goes down. And vice versa. All other factors being equal, there is an inverse relationship between price and demand. But all things are never equal. If the price for a product goes up and demand doesn’t change at all, we say that demand is inelastic. If, on the other hand, price for a product goes up and sales drop to nothing, we say that the demand for the product is perfectly elastic.

In the context of the music industry, vendors have discovered that the market for digital music is relatively elastic. Record labels have had to set their price with one eye on their main competitor—the pirate/consumer. Contrary to popular belief, pirate/consumers do not download music tracks for free. They pay a price which is a function of such factors as:

• cost of internet connection and bandwidth

• cost of hardware

• risk of getting caught X consequences of getting caught

Consequences can include fines (depending on the jurisdiction in question) and academic discipline (where the pirate/consumers are students using school servers). Record labels and vendors like Apple have discovered that the $.99 price point for music tracks is low enough to compete with the notional price paid by pirate/consumers. At the same time, demand for digital music tracks is elastic enough that the reduction in price has resulted in an increase in demand.

Digital books haven’t been around long enough to provide us with useful data, but I suspect demand for digital books is inelastic. The reason for this rests on a single factor: time.

From a book consumer’s point of view, the most significant contributor to a book’s price is the time required to read it. Because most music consumers listen while doing something else, the temporal component we can assign to an audio track’s value is typically zero. Compare that to the price for a long novel like Infinite Jest or War and Peace. While we can buy Infinite Jest on Kobo for $9.99 and War and Peace for free, it is legitimate to measure their cost to individual consumers in thousands of dollars (expressed as an opportunity cost). And, except for those of us who live in science fiction universes, our temporal income is fixed and constant, so the amount of time we invest in one book reduces the amount at our disposal to invest in others. This means that the change in a store’s price tag has little effect on a book’s real price to a consumer.

It is arguable that people buy books they never read, and therefore I have exaggerated the real cost of books. After all, I myself have bought books for the simple pleasure of possessing them, and with no reasonable hope of ever reading them. But with the shift to the ebook market, this secondary motivation disappears. Who would buy an ebook for the smell of its paper or the signature on the title page or for the pleasure of looking at it on the shelf? One of the biggest shakedowns of epublishing will happen on the consumer end of the supply chain with a change in buying habits—readers will become more scrupulous, buying only those books they have the time to read.

Although it is possible to treat time as an unquantified component of a book’s purchase price, it is just as plausible to treat time as a factor affecting demand. It doesn’t really matter how we treat the issue, the consequences are the same. As a factor affecting demand, we can say that time imposes a practical ceiling on demand for ebooks. Suppose the average reader has time for no more than one book each week. No reduction in price—not even to zero—will change that practical limitation.

What are the consequences of (in)elasticity in demand for the epublishing market? I throw out several points for your consideration. Treat them more in the spirit of discussion points.

1. The proliferation of pirated ebooks has far less significance to the publishing industry than the proliferation of pirated mp3 files to the music industry. While testing the availability of pirated ebooks, I recently downloaded a folder containing 6,000 ebooks. If I read continuously for the rest of my life, I would be hard-pressed to “consume” 6,000 ebooks. Unlike mp3 files, whose cost is nominal, the opportunity costs of pirated ebooks, even for a pirate, are significant. Pirated ebooks have already saturated the market. The fact that there are new pirated titles tomorrow won’t make the market any more saturated; it only means that tomorrow there will be even more books available that I don’t have the time to read.

2. A greater threat to epublishing is the legitimate book priced at $.99. These books will not result in increased sales across the industry since, as I have already noted, demand has a practical limit. Instead, profitability in the book publishing industry will fall. It has to. It’s also worth noting that the reduced price cannot be justified as a ploy to combat piracy.

3. Searching for a sweet price point is only half the game. Book length is just as important. And Epublishers need to make an ebook’s length clearly visible so consumers know its true cost.

4. Vendors, like Apple, whose sales platform makes little differentiation between audio files and text files, cannot help but hurt epublishers because (among other things) its model assumes an elasticity of demand that doesn’t exist.

YOU ARE NOT A GADGET

Technology can be frustrating.

You may remember reading a news item from July, 2009 about a 17-year-old Kindle user named Justin Gawronski who was reading George Orwell’s 1984 for a school assignment when the book disappeared from his device. The problem was that he had been making notes on his Kindle to help him complete his assignment and his notes disappeared too. Amazon claimed that whoever had posted that edition of 1984 did not have the right to sell it, and so Amazon deleted it from all Kindle devices and refunded the purchase price—but not the kid’s school work.

Or what about the May 16th article from Chilling Effects examining the volume of DMCA takedown notices issued by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI)? The IFPI polices websites to ensure that they don’t post digital music that is subject to copyright protection. If it has a “good faith belief” that the posted content is unauthorized, the onus rests on the owner of the website to establish that the posting is legitimate. Since the process of challenging a takedown notice is expensive and complex, even legitimate websites typically disappear once they receive such a notice. At the height of its activity in January, the IFPI was averaging about one takedown notice every three minutes. Not bad for an organization with a small staff. The inference, of course, is that the whole process of developing a “good faith belief” is performed by bots.

Or what about an example closer to home? Ever had to struggle with Microsoft Word’s formatting tools? The software tries to anticipate your intentions as you develop your brochure or newsletter or outline. Meanwhile, you wish it would stop guessing wrong all the time.

These are all examples of digital design issues that were locked in years ago by software developers who gave little thought to the way in which their automation tools would interact with real human beings.

This is the main theme of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget, a critical examination of the digital world we have created for ourselves and how that is affecting our understanding of what it means to be human.

The examples I’ve given above end up frustrating us because they arise from a world view which seems to be ubiquitous among technologists. They are manifestations of “cybernetic totalism”—the view that our technology is progressing inexorably to a state of self-awareness and intelligence. Digital designers subscribe to this view as if it were a religion. Like a religion, it comes in different forms which we might call denominations. There’s an apocalyptic denomination that anticipates a rapture. Only, in this rapture, there is no heaven for virtuous humans. Instead, we either become irrelevant or die in one of any number of end-game scenarios.

There are more benign examples of cybernetic totalism. There is the denomination that believes that if we amass enough information and network it, a governing intelligence will emerge. Google belongs to this sect. Its project to scan all the world’s books is driven by this belief. A competing model believes in the idea of a “hive mind.”  A greater intelligence arises, not from the machines themselves, but from the way the machines facilitate the networking of humans to perform certain tasks. Wikipedia belongs to this sect. It believes the contributions of many ultimately hone intellectual output to create “products” that are superior to the “products” an individual could create.

In his paean to contrarian thinking, Lanier believes these accounts are nonsense. To explain why he believes “cybernetic totalism” is a crock, he takes us down a rabbit hole of philosophy, religion and culture. In the end, his view is determined by ethics. He makes the simple observation that cybernetic totalists have no way to determine when they’ve achieved their goal of machine intelligence. The best they can do is appeal to the Turing test which Lanier frames thus:

“Turing presented his new offering in the form of a thought experiment, based on a popular Victorian parlor game. A man and a woman hide, and a judge is asked to determine which is which by relying only on the texts of notes passed back and forth. Turing replaced the woman with a computer. Can the judge tell which is the man? If not, is the computer conscious? Intelligent?”

Lanier rejects the test. The problem lies with the judge. How can the judge draw an adequate comparison between the performance of a machine and a human if the judge has no criteria for understanding what it means to be human? There is a fundamental arrogance at the heart of the Turing test and, Lanier argues, at the heart of digital design. We simply have no criteria, and never will, because there is something ineffable about being human. The Turing test works only if we degrade humans. Lanier’s book is an appeal to treat humans as wondrous creatures. Digital design must work with an ethic which respects that in our nature.

Lanier sets out current problems with digital design.

Lock-in. With the development of software, lock-in occurs when too many other programs become dependent upon it and the cost of change becomes prohibitive. The result is that sometimes bad design becomes permanent. Lanier cites the MIDI protocol as an example. In a limited set of situations, MIDI can be an empowering tool for musicians, but because its use has become so widespread, it has ultimately had a reductive influence upon digital music. The phrase he uses is “nuance-challenged” and, speaking of lock-in, he observes that “a thousand years from now, when a descendant of ours is traveling at relativistic speeds to explore a new star system, she will probably be annoyed by some awful beepy MIDI-driven music to alert her that the antimatter filter needs to be recalibrated.”  Seriously. Whatever the device you are using to read this review, it is MIDI capable.

Fragmentation. “Information is alienated experience.”  A global information network decontextualizes the experience which grounds the information it generates.

How did you arrive at this blog? If you arrived via a search engine, then you may have landed on this page without walking through my “front door.”  What were you expecting? An impersonal discussion that pretends (like wikipedia) to a detached, objective, impersonal point of view? Are you aware that this blog post of mine occurs within a sequence of thoughts that I have been recording online for six years now? I would like to think that this post is a lot like a brick in an edifice that I am building. I think of this edifice as an expression of my world view. It is shaped by more than information. It is also shaped by the particularity of my personal experience which includes concerns like my roots, my personal relationships, cultural and religious influences, education, aspirations, gender, sexuality.

If you were to do a proper job of contextualizing this review, you’d have to read my blog from top to bottom—not an easy task because it’s grown to something like half a million words. Even then, you wouldn’t have much of a context. You’d have to call me on the phone for a chat, get a feel for my personality, arrange to meet for a coffee. Even then, you wouldn’t have much of a context. You’d have to get to know me, foster a friendship.

Contextualizing information takes work. We think machines can do the work for us. But they can’t. How can a machine foster my friendships for me?

Anonymity. This is related to fragmentation. In the world of web 2.0, the ability to post anonymous comments was a deliberate design decision. It has proven to be a disastrous design decision. It has degraded public discourse. It has encouraged good people to say and do horrible things to others. It has allowed us to evade personal responsibility.

It is not surprising then, that in a list of suggestions “of things you can do to be a person instead of a source of fragments to be exploited by others,” Lanier places “Don’t post anonymously” at the very top.

Cultural Erosion. In the conflict that has arisen between Big Media (RIAA, MPAA & the IFPI mentioned above) and Open Culture proponents, Lanier takes a surprising view. Both camps subscribe to versions of cybernetic totalism and so their dispute is a distinction without difference. He argues that unless cultural efforts are shared in ways that produce artificial scarcity, the infinite replicability of digital media will, in the long run, render all digital creation worthless. The experience of the music industry demonstrates that music shared through open channels like the creative commons does not and (Lanier argues) cannot generate a livable income. The only people who make money online in the guise of “Open Culture” are those who come to it with already flourishing careers. There are one-off exceptions of course, but these deserve as much attention in strategic thought about the promotion of online cultural activities as winning the lottery deserves in developing a personal financial plan.

Lanier takes aim at those who claim that “information wants to be free.”  Even today, Cory Doctorow posted a piece in the Guardian addressing this statement. Doctorow’s quibble is with the words “information” and “free.”  As he says, it’s people, and not information, who want to be free. Lanier would say Doctorow should be looking at the word “want” instead. It would make more sense for Doctorow to reject the rather juvenile fantasy of cybernetic totalism which, like a bad religion, reifies something that isn’t even real. Information can’t “want” anything. It is nothing until we humans give it a context and a meaning.

If we care about culture, whether we describe it as “open” or otherwise, then we should take a long hard look at design issues. How do human beings interact with digital culture? What is possible? Are there alternatives to DRM? (Lanier makes some proposals.)  Can we make artificial scarcities which allow creators to earn a living in the digital environment? Does publishing have to face the same issues that the music industry has faced? Has the design of the Kindle already locked-in?

These are important questions and they need to be answered now. Otherwise, in very short order, the internet will reduce to a machine that monetizes the value of our free efforts (like this book review) and delivers that value to a handful of elites. You already know their names: Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple, Facebook, Twitter.

IF READING IS CONSUMPTION, THEN WRITING IS EXCRETION

E-ink is a lie. It tries to persuade us that writing is black. While I don’t doubt that some of it is black, the very best writing appears in brown ink. That’s because the very best writing is smeared on the page in shit. Romantics say the author writes from the heart. Intellectuals say the author writes from the head. But a true author—a warrior-poet, a prophet of divine judgment, a heckler of earthly powers—such an author writes from the ass.

When silk-tied fops speak of the publishing industry as if it were an oil field with wells sunk into the heads of writerly men and women, and when their soulless acolytes speak of consumers, I can’t help but think they’ve lost control of their metaphor. There was a time when consumption was something we did at the kitchen table, and the economy it supported went no further than the front door of the house. Now we speak of consumption the way priests speak of the Eucharist. We take our holy products on the tongue and by a miraculous consubstantiation, we become the things we swallow: I am Apple; I am Motorola; I am Nike; I am Coca-cola.

Or more to the point: I am Harper Perennial; I am Harlequin; I am Chapters/Indigo; I am Barnes & Noble; I am Amazon.

While consumption begins in the kitchen, it ends in the toilet bowl. This is a fact the priests of the new economy omit in their liturgies. After 9/11, when his holiness, G.W. Bush, instructed the faithful to shop, he forgot to mention this would induce a case of the runs that would fill a cesspool far deeper than the pit left behind after the collapse of the twin towers.

We are a race of gastronomic prodigies who force goods down the gullet in spasms of peristaltic glee, loosening our sphincters all the way down then blasting the half-digested bits wherever we aim our rear ends. How fortunate for those closest to me that I am, before all else, a consumer of words rather than a consumer of plastic and rubber.

Consumption is a neutral activity. A deer consumes grass in a meadow, then bounds to the woods to shit. Without some consumption, every living creature would die.

As with the consumption of food, so with the consumption of words: there is a practical limit to the quantity consumed. Like most people, I can’t eat much more than my hunger allows. Even if I could, even if I had a medical condition that made me feel perpetual hunger, my eating would not be boundless (it would soon exhaust me and my death would put an end to my eating). The same is true of words. I can consume words for only twenty-four hours of every day. That, of course, is a theoretical limit. In practice, I don’t read while I sleep, nor while I floss my teeth.

The problem with consumption lies more in its quality. If I eat too quickly, I might develop a case of diarrhea. If my food is tainted, I might vomit. If my food is thick and heavy, I might be constipated for days. But set before me a well-prepared meal, one with a variety of servings, with a well-planned succession of courses accompanied by an excellent glass of wine, and I will reward you with a firm stool that passes comfortably, presents with a warm brown colouration, and emits a rich odour.

This is the end of consumption: to offer up something fresh and pungent at the end of the day.

The same holds for the consumption of words. Writing is the literary equivalent of a shit in the woods after a session of hearty grazing.

I aspire to offer my readers warm coffee-coloured turds that tingle in the nostrils and send up plumes of steam in the wintertime. But I’ll never do that if all I consume are the words of hacks. If I were to wolf down a pallet of schlock thrillers (strands of dialogue strung between three-word sentences) the best I could offer on my own account would be a case of amoebic dysentery. You would read me as a runny gruel that seeps into the grout of the kitchen floor. Or if I were to subsist on a diet of Victorian novels, they would run through my intestines as naturally as a daily Big Mac through an Inuit, and I would be stopped up until, after weeks of bloated agony, I would explode with a volley of rock-like pellets.

Instead, give me a rich and varied diet. Cook from the recipes of both the living and the dead. Give me leafy greens and pasta. Give me bruschetta and marbled meats, wine and rutabagas, cheeses and coffees and desserts that fry in flaming rum. On such a diet, I can squeeze out nuggets of such delicacy that mothers will bring their children to gawk, curators will beg for samples to place under glass for posterity, and revolutionaries will use them as incendiary devices to lob at dictators and CEO’s.

If we are indeed consumers, we cannot help but shit, and the result cannot help but be a mashup of all we swallowed the day before.

Writers are consumers of the first rank, gobbling by the bucket the words of their peers and squeezing out a rich paste. They can’t pull words from the air any more than they can sniff the farts of angels. Instead, they chew on all the words they have gulped, ruminating like cows in the dirt, swallowing and regurgitating, burping and grunting, then every now and again producing a great platt in the pasture.

But now. But now. How things have changed!

The silk-tied fops have arrived with their corks and shoved them up our bums and have told us we aren’t allowed to shit as nature intended by mashing up all we’ve digested. Now, if we want to shit, we must either squat like scatological gods and squeeze our shit ex nihilo or harvest it from a choir of raging aphasics. Whatever we consume, we must hold it in our bowels to fester until we bloat and burst, spewing our poisoned stew on illiterate innocents.

At first, the cork slips, allowing a pale soup to dribble onto the page. This gives writers a piffle to work with, a smear across a sheet of foolscap or a brown ass-shaped imprint for an ebook. But the brown-nosed acolytes are busy sniffing our shit, sending it to the lab for analysis, afraid that traces of our meals may have found their way into our stools. To be safe, they bend us over tables and take sledgehammers to our corks. They weld shut our sphincters. They seal our orifices with nuclear powered force fields. And always, they sniff through the dirt for more shit.

Part Six

Reading Religion

FUCKING HIGH

On Sunday, my daughter had her first confirmation class. The minister, to his credit, asked the kids to bring along a song—whatever they happened to be listening to—so that he could get a feel for where they are in their lives. My daughter asked if I could burn “You’re Beautiful” to a CD for her. I’ve heard the song on the radio; maybe you have too. James Blunt sings about love and heartache and sounds like one of those sensitive guys—you know the ones—the guys all the girls fawn over—the guys parents would love their daughters to go out with. Then I listened to the song. Wait a second. Did I just hear the word “fuck?” I looked up the lyrics and discovered that there is a radio (i.e. sanitized) cover & a CD cover. I pointed this out to my daughter and she confessed that she doesn’t really listen to the lyrics; she just likes the feel of the song and hadn’t really noticed before. OK, I said; I just wanted to be sure she knew. So she took her song with the word “fuck” to church.

I don’t know about this word “fuck.” We live in conservative times when some people (whose identity always seems obscure) feel compelled to protect us from our baser instincts—as if we, left to our own devices, would naturally stray into a chaotic way of living where words like “fuck” would assault our sensibilities at every turn.

In fact, the word “fuck” has been with us for some time. Certainly Henry Miller made much of it in The Tropic of Cancer. George Carlin has celebrated its use in connection with its 6 lesser siblings. More recently, David Eggers has expressed ambivalent feelings about its use, acknowledging that it crops up in his conversation, but wondering whether it really should be used as a verb. I seem to recall that it appears in Shakespeare in a backhanded way—in one of the histories (maybe Henry V), a French woman asks why the English talk so much about the foot. In my copy of Young’s Analytical Concordance to the Bible, I see no instances of “fuck,” but who can doubt that “fucking” is precisely what David was doing to Bathsheba? In fact, the Bible is chock full of fucking.

In church, more than anyplace else, one encounters a sometimes stifling sense of propriety. Things must be done just so; words spoken in just this way, heads bowed at just this angle, expressions revealing just this much awe or reverence—as if the experience of church is one great magic incantation. If we don’t get everything right, then the spell will be broken and God—just another djinn in the bottle—will refuse to pop up in our midst because we rubbed the bottle the wrong way. This is complicated by the fact that different people have different notions of “proper.” Some think it is proper for people to burst into spontaneous applause if they hear music that stirs them: they say that it is not just the music, but also the spirit, which moves them; others are aghast at applause and feel this destroys the contemplative atmosphere of worship. Some think it would be fun to have a drum kit, rhythm guitar and a couple of doo-wah backup singers shaking tambourines; others can’t imagine worship without a big pipe organ shaking the foundations. These debates began long before I was born and, no doubt, will go on long after I’ve turned to dust. Between you and me, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass—oops, there I go with the language—for the propriety of worship. God is there. Period. No special words needed. No candles necessary. More often than not, I suspect God is there in spite of us. If you want to create the perfect mood, then do it alone. I don’t write this flippantly; there are times when each one of us needs to approach our spiritual centre in privacy. But worship in church is celebration as a community, and, since we are talking about the revelation of universal truths here, there is one universal truth you can stake your life on—living in community is a messy business. People come together from widely divergent experiences, bearing all sorts of fears and cares, hoping with impossible, often contradictory, expectations. If each person holds to private experiences, personal fears, and unexpressed hopes as the measure of propriety, then everybody will leave the sanctuary feeling disappointed.

In our places of worship, more than anyplace else, we encounter a hunger for meaning. Our practices around the word “fuck” and other taboo incantations reveal much about how we think, or fail to think, about what it means to mean something. Sometimes, to avoid printing the word, we print “f**k” instead, or, in the case of radio and television, we beep over it. sometimes, we encounter people who consider a word, like God, too important to trivialize in its printed form, and so they print “G—d” instead, capitalized of course, as if God might strike them dead for printing the label in full.

Fuck and God are not magic incantations; they are signs—just as f**k and G—d are signs. Fuck and f**k share identical referents, as do God and G—d. The meaning does not reside in the squiggles that appear on the screen or on the paper, nor does it reside in the auricular sensations we experience when somebody speaks aloud these words. Meaning is an act. It is an act of communication between two or more people. And communication only happens in community—that messy place where worship also happens. Meanings can only happen if people already find themselves embedded in the language which grounds their utterances. As babies, we are baptized into language. It is a full immersion, with words of parents and older siblings flowing all around us, prompting us to respond with gurglings and cooings as we grow towards articulate speech. Later, it becomes a communion, as we participate fully in a lifelong conversation which is both meaningful and meaning-filled.

I wonder, too, about our notions of propriety when we approach God. The propriety of our approach may be good for us; we may be more receptive to God’s presence if we feel settled. But does it really matter to God? Will God be any less present to us if we are upset or anxious or just pissed off? Will God turn and run if we get angry and swear? I wonder what Jesus really said in the Garden of Gethsemane when he realized that he was done for. Did the gospel writers sanitize things for us just the way censors compel singers like James Blunt to produce sanitized lyrics for radio? Whatever one’s theology says about the humanity of Jesus, I think when you are about to have nails driven through your hands and feet, you might say something like: “God, what the fuck were you thinking?” On a couple of occasions in my life, I have found myself in crisis. I know, in retrospect, that God was very much present to me in those moments, not because I got down on my knees and lit a candle and hummed a few bars from a nice hymn, but because I got raging mad and told God where to shove the universe. This doesn’t exactly make for poetic testimony at some mealy-mouthed Bible study, but, well … it’s my testimony … God only ever became real to me when I trusted enough to unburden myself of my real feelings. At that moment, then, a new kind of conversation started. Now, I really understand what the exegetes say about the Aramaic word “abba”—it is closer to “daddy” than “father.” I don’t exactly refer to God as my daddy, but God and I are most definitely on more familiar terms these days.

As for my daughter, she played the song at church. Nobody noticed the lyrics, or if they did, they didn’t seem to mind. Good for them. Good for her.

THE MAGI TODAY

This Christmas, more than usual, people have been crying foul over issues of political correctness. The most notable instance of this arose around the decision by Seattle’s Sea–Tac International Airport authority to remove from its premises all Christmas trees and related paraphernalia. A rabbi had petitioned the airport for inclusion of a menorah amongst the decorations. After consulting with its lawyers (naturally), it concluded that it would be simpler to remove all decorations than be sensitive to the existence of other faith traditions and their ways of celebrating. Seattle residents are angry.

Closer to home, a similar anger has arisen from a rather odd source. It seems an unsigned letter is circulating on the letterhead of a blue–chip firm in Toronto’s financial district. I have confirmed that the purported author did, in fact, pen the epistle. However, good taste (and fear of liability) prevents me from revealing its author’s identity. Needless to say, the person in question owns a significant piece of downtown real estate. It would appear that she has found Jesus and is incensed that she can’t share that discovery with all the world. The demands of political correctness are nothing short of reverse discrimination. Since Jesus is, after all, “the way, the truth, and the life,” isn’t it incumbent upon the author to share the Good News?

The fact that the author sends this missive on the finest stationery to friends who are partners and CEO’s and majority shareholders of all her “aligned” interests should, of itself, constitute sufficient evidence why political correctness (which I prefer to call “sensitivity”) is necessary. No other religion has such access. But for most of the world, the Good News has proved to be some of the worst news imaginable. The most significant event in the history of Christianity had nothing to do with the birth of Jesus; it was Constantine’s decision, early in the 4th century, to make Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire. At that point, Christianity allied itself with the concerns of power and ceased to be a band of misfits operating on the social margins. One need only look to the White House to recognize how that alliance persists today.

For me, Christmas has become a difficult proposition. In a good mood, I am inclined to treat it as a non–event, an excuse for a holiday. In a darker mood, I am tempted to treat it as an occasion to remember the introduction to our planet of untold horrors, in the same way I might remember the Holocaust or the bombing of Nagasaki. Is there anything I can salvage from the wreckage of the Christmas celebration?

Last week, I received a Christmas card (not a holiday card) from a Farsi friend of mine. Inside, he had written: “Did you know that the magi were actually Zoroastrian priests? Neat, eh?” My friend is Zoroastrian. His note made me think. What if … (always a good way to begin a theological reflection) … what if the Messianic announcement and the Jesus birth were calls, not to a new believing, but to a new doing? What if that nativity was a grand act of ecumenism, summoning the faithful of every faith whatever the faith—like the Zoroastrian magi—to engage one another as fellow travellers on a spiritual pilgrimage? What if that is the Christmas message?

On such an account, the Sea–Tac International airport authority is wrong. It should have tried, with all abandon, to honour people of every tradition. In the same way, the author of this letter that has found its way onto the desks of the well–connected should not be worried if her own tradition gets little notice in the midst of so many other manifestations of faithfulness. In fact, this is a greater cause for celebration. If we have to attend with all deliberation to the traditions of our brothers and sisters, then we cannot help but notice that, above all else, the world is full of people yearning in their own ways for the in–breaking of the spiritual into their daily lives. We are bound together in that yearning.

And so, 2000 years after the birth of Jesus, I feel as if I have enjoyed a personal visit from the magi, and like their predecessors so long ago, they have blessed me with a gift—a fresh insight about the nature of my own believing. It reassures me that there is, indeed, Good News: it is possible to listen; it is possible to find true spirituality amongst those whose traditions are very different from our own; it is possible to celebrate together; it is possible to enjoy a communion of all humanity.

BEYOND THE GOLDEN RULE

As a kid, I grew up internalizing two messages from my Sunday school classes. One had to do with my place in the spiritual world (“God loves you”) and the other had to do with my place in the physical world (“Be nice to others”). For me, God was spirit and Jesus was ethics, being and doing, praying and living. This dualist view of things is neatly captured by the two suggestions Jesus gave to his disciples. One suggestion had to do with love (love God, love one another). The other had to do with action—which should be obvious from the fact that it begins with the word “do.”

As I find myself drawn into the progressive Christian fold, I hear a lot of talk about how we should think about our spiritual tradition. This is understandable. Most of us come from a spiritual practice that emphasizes the regular and dutiful repetition of foundational statements about the nature of God. God is great. God is good. God provides us with our food. The progressive point of view begins by questioning whether these foundational statements are so foundational after all. But I have heard much less about how we should think about our ethical tradition: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Part of the reason we feel no particular qualms about adopting the Golden Rule as a reasonable guide for our living is that it doesn’t violate the first part of the progressive argument. In fact, there’s nothing about it that requires us to believe in a deity. It speaks to the way we relate to one another. This is very much of a piece with progressive thinking. It has the further attraction of being a universal rule. The Ontario-based web site, religioustolerance.org, presents versions of the Golden Rule (aka the ethic of reciprocity) in 21 different world religions and notes that “there is a growing consensus that all humans are equal in importance.”  It goes on to say: “In our opinion, the greatest failure of organized religion is its historical inability to convince their followers that the Ethic of Reciprocity applies to all humans, not merely to fellow believers” (emphasis in original). The sentiment sounds progressive, doesn’t it?

This raises an interesting question: how could we have been so insightful as to articulate a universal ethic that has stood without revision for more than 2000 years, and yet have failed so miserably when articulating a reasonable theology? Or is it possible that the Golden Rule doesn’t stand on such a sure footing after all?

Historically, our theological shifts have happened because they have been forced to confront challenges from experience. For example, Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo presented the world with a new understanding of our (increasingly marginal) place in the universe. The church resisted, but cumulative models based on empirical findings have shrunk the spaces where God can present as a credible notion. And while the Renaissance could unseat our acceptance of ecclesial authority, there persisted a sense of unity through the Holy Spirit. But even that came into question with the emergence of psychoanalysis and neuroscience which cast a cloud of skepticism over even our most numinous apprehensions of divinity.

And yet, as empiricism went running roughshod over all our convictions, it left our ethic intact. In fact, the brilliance of the Golden Rule is that it is detachable from our religion, like a modular piece of IKEA furniture. Even better: its truth is empirically verifiable, or so the game theorists tell us. We can develop computer simulations that model competitive scenarios and these clearly demonstrate that altruism produces the best outcome. And our most enlightened economists offer a global vision of altruism in which wealth is optimized and the poorest nations are lifted out of poverty.

But there are two problems. The first is philosophical. Altruism is a function of motive, not outcome. It’s wrong to say that the Golden Rule promotes altruistic behaviour, because altruism and behaviour are like apples and oranges; they grow on different trees, one moral, the other, ethical. Altruism happens deep within us and reflects a private orientation towards the wider world. Behaviour happens in the wider world and reflects the outcomes of our private orientation. So, for example, the press may hail me a hero for leaping onto a baby to protect it from falling bricks, and perhaps I was indeed motivated by compassion, or perhaps I merely wished to save myself a lot of bother sifting through rubble and consoling distraught parents. The outcomes may be identical, but it is the private motivation which determines their altruistic character. The problem with the Golden Rule is that it is entirely consistent with the second scenario; it need not demand anything of me as a moral being. The most that can be said is that it promotes an enlightened self-interest.

The second problem flows from the first but is a little more practical. Heeding today’s enlightened economists, we nurture a utopian vision—peace and prosperity, where children no longer wake up to a hunger that never goes away, and where people no longer war with one another to secure scarce resources. Do unto others … Lift them up just as we would be lifted up. Isn’t this the outcome that all liberal North Americans crave? The global application of the Golden Rule?

But this is where, after 2000 years, the Golden Rule finally collides with empiricism, and like our theology, it requires some adjustment. There is a fact which the Golden Rule could not possibly have anticipated when introduced to a small village in Roman–ruled Palestine: that one day human beings would live to the limits of the planet’s resources. For 2000 years, we have been making two assumptions whenever we cite the Golden Rule. We have assumed that “others” refers only to humans. And we have assumed that what we would want others to do unto us would be rational. But experience shows that neither assumption is valid.

In his book, From Naked Ape to Superspecies, David Suzuki identifies as our greatest failing the emergence of a dualist world view. This is the view that detaches human beings and their rational brains from the natural world and holds rationalism over and against the world. This is akin to the view I mentioned at the outset, the view I learned as a child in Sunday school that detaches the spiritual from the ethical. Instead, ecologists have traced a radical interdependence. We are not something apart from our bodies. We are not ghosts in machines. Instead, body and spirit are a unity. In the same way, as a species, we do not live apart from our world. We are embedded in it and utterly dependent upon it. What would we do unto the bacteria living in our guts? What would we do unto the dirt in our gardens?

This month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the first two parts of its Fourth Assessment Report. The findings are unequivocal. Climate change is real and it’s our fault. At the same time, Tonga and Viet Nam have become the latest members of the World Trade Organization, hoping that participation in liberalized trade will promote economic growth so that they can become more “developed.” What we would have others do unto us is to make us wealthy. If we accommodate others by encouraging them to become wealthy too, then (according to the terms of the Golden Rule) we grant ourselves license to acquire more. But, for some resources, more is impossible. Global oil reserves are finite and now quantifiable. Global water cycles provide a fixed amount of fresh water each year. And with a swath of rain forest the size of Greece cut down each year, the Amazon could be barren by 2020. There is no more.

The Golden Rule has reached its limit and now needs an adjustment. The work of our ethic can no longer begin with others, but must begin with an inward gaze. We must examine our desires. What would we have done unto us? More? What would an ethic look like if it demanded that we hope for less instead of more? What words would we use? I expect it would no longer be quite so pithy as our beloved Golden Rule. But pithy never made anything true.

RELIGIOUS LITERALISM

A popular target of liberal religious criticism is the “literal interpretation.” This is an idea which is easy enough to dispose of—“literal interpretation” is incoherent since, by definition, if something is interpreted, then it’s not literal. The liberal points a finger at his more conservative neighbour and ridicules her belief in everything from floods to raptures, but it doesn’t take much to demonstrate why such beliefs, as outlandish as they may seem to mainstream interpreters, are anything but literal.

Consider the Book of Revelation, a great hotbed of interpretive activity. Who is the Whore of Babylon? A liberal exegesis might approach the text with some historical tools in hand. The Book of Revelation was probably written between 92 and 96 C.E. (Brown) and may or may not have been written by a man named John who was exiled to the island of Patmos. Whoever the author, exile was uppermost in his mind. The historical interpreter would consider the fact that more than 600 years earlier, in 586 B.C.E., Nebuchadnezzar’s armies had captured the Kingdom of Judah, destroyed the temple in Jerusalem and deported the Jews to Babylon.

In his lifetime, the author of the Book of Revelation would have witnessed the Roman occupation of what was called the province of Palestine and the destruction once again of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E. There would have been a strong correspondence in his mind between Babylon and Rome and between Nebuchadnezzar and Caesar. The Whore of Babylon would have been a conveniently cryptic shorthand for Rome. In other words, John of Patmos intended that his writings be read allegorically as an exhortation to his fellow sufferers that a day would come when the oppressors would fall and Israel would taste freedom once again. They had survived Egypt; they had survived Babylonia; they had survived Persia; they had survived Assyria; so they would survive Rome too. The end of time, as figured in the Book of Revelation, should be understood as a state of freedom from oppression.

The so-called literalists take the same book and offer a different gloss. John may well have been writing about Rome, but the whore is the Roman Church and the anti-Christ is the Pope. Of course, Catholic literalists suggest something different. Maybe the whore is America and the anti-Christ is the president. Or the whore is the middle-east and the anti-Christ is bin Laden. Or the whore is China and the anti-Christ is Hu Jintao. Whatever the gloss, it’s always allegorical, never literal. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of a single theologian who believes that John was writing about an historical woman who rode into town on a beast and turned tricks for dinarii.

The dispute between interpreters and literalists is illusory. The only dispute you’ll ever encounter in the theological arena is the dispute between one school of interpreters and another school of interpreters. Each seeks the primacy of its own gloss. And there is only ever one motivation for asserting the primacy of an interpretation—power. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the recent trend amongst conservative Christians to assert that America is a Christian nation. The natural corollary of this assertion is the claim that their brand of Christianity has a greater entitlement to influence political outcomes.

I would like to push this further by suggesting that not only is the idea of a literal interpretation incoherent, but also the idea of literalism itself. Literalism is an expression of an ideal. Like a hoped-for freedom from oppression, literalism is a hoped-for freedom from all the mediating clutter that introduces distortions between a symbol and its meaning.

My wife’s uncle (whom I have eulogized here) used to lead a youth group at our church, and he said on more than one occasion that he believed that once we die, we can communicate with those who have gone before us, but it won’t be communication through speech. It will be by direct thought transfer. Without bodies, there won’t be the same limitations. Tom was a medical doctor and spoke with great authority, so as teenagers we were inclined to accept his view of things. Now, in middle age, I think of his conviction as a twofold expression. Tom was lamenting our fallen state. Perhaps as a doctor he was more keenly aware of the limitations which our bodies impose. He was also expressing a hope for a recovery from that fallen state, an ideal state which includes perfect unmediated communication.

In its grand sweep, this is the story of the Bible. It is an epistemological quest narrative. It begins with exile and ends with return. It begins with fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. At the instant the fruit is eaten, humans become self-aware; they experience the trauma of consciousness. It is the lament of our separation from a perfect knowledge. And the quest ends with the unlocking of all the seals. Sandwiched between the Garden and the Kingdom are the stories of Babel and Pentecost—confusion and perfect understanding. It is John (not John of Patmos) who makes explicit that this whole story is about knowledge and about language as the mediator of that knowledge: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

To put it in its grandest terms, the Bible is the story of the ultimate triumph of literalism.

However, because we live in a fallen world, or (since I reject literalism) because the idea of undistorted meaning is just as incoherent as the idea of literal interpretation, I choose to receive the word, in whatever form, as necessarily multifarious, muddled and indeterminate. In fact, when we approach literature, multifarious, muddled and indeterminate describe the virtues of every classic ever composed. We celebrate the poem that yields up a vein of rich thought. We groan at puns and double entendres. We delight in textured works that support multiple—sometimes contradictory—readings.

A simple example is George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Ostensibly a children’s tale, it is also a celebrated critique of Stalinism. Ironically, it supports an allegorical reading, just like the Book of Revelation. But other works can support even more complicated readings. A classic example is Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. With each turn of the screw, we see the governess in a different light until we’re not sure what to make of her. Is she a concerned child-care worker? A sexually repressed neurotic? A psychotic? How do we decide which is the correct interpretation? The answer is: because The Turn of the Screw isn’t scripture, no decision is required. We can defer our decision indefinitely, or simply savour our state of indecision.

Imagine if I could justify putting you to death because you insisted that the governess is a psychotic! And yet people have given their lives for less. There is something about scripture that compels people to resolve indeterminacies to a single point and to impose that point on everybody else.

In the end, there is no such thing as literalism. The activity we describe as literalism is the privileging of the most obvious interpretation. Animal Farm is really about barn yard animals. Moby Dick is really about the mechanics of whaling. Frankenstein is really a Gothic horror story. There’s no great harm in literalism. As a literal reader, you may miss the critique of Stalinism, or the allegory about evil and cosmic forces, or the meditation on the shortcomings of rational science, but you’ll still get some pleasure from your reading.

More dangerous than literalism is the impulse to resolve indeterminacies. It does violence to the text and ultimately to people. It insists on privileging a single purpose. It is a self-serving politic. And it bastardizes the claim that the pen is mightier than the sword.

Perhaps the way to avoid conflict is to rethink the Biblical narrative. As long as we assume that the end (telos) of history is a perfect knowledge, then we perpetuate conflict by trying to resolve the irresolvable. The belief in a single irreducible perfect “I am” is the belief in a positive claim. But the rejection of such a possibility doesn’t necessitate a negative claim. What if the end (telos) of history is not resolution but silence? What if the only intelligible answer to Babel is not Pentecost but solitude?

Disputes between literalists and their liberal detractors are rendered pointless because both proceed on the assumption that “What does it all mean?” is a legitimate question to which the Bible is an intelligible answer. But if we reframe the question, if we view the end (telos) of history as, for example, living in right relation with each other and everything else, then a better question might be: “What must I be?” To such a question, silence may be the only answer.

We can then set aside the Bible, preserving it as an historical and literary curiosity, or at least as a convenient doorstop.

THE GLORIOUS APPEARING - FROM THE LEFT BEHIND PEOPLE

I tried. I really did. In my continuing quest to plumb the mind of the fundamentalist evangelical Christian (FEC for short), I tried to read Glorious Appearing, the 12th and final installment of the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. Commercially, the series is what we call a “publishing phenomenon” selling more than 60 million copies and generating spin-offs, like a children’s series, video games, graphic novels, and devotional resources.

Those of us who aren’t FECs (does that make us feckless?) and who comprise the group the FECs most want to help (the un-saved and un-born again) have a tendency to dismiss this stuff outright. But in doing so, we commit the very sin we most often accuse FECs of committing: we read only those books which reinforce our pre-existing point of view and foreclose the possibility of being affected by their insights; we make no effort to listen closely to their sermons or to read their materials with a discerning eye. Instead, we reduce them to caricatures: morbidly obese simple-minded Americans with southern drawls and big cars.

But it doesn’t lie in our mouths to protest the caricatures they’ve deployed against us (whoever us is) unless we’re willing to do some serious listening—or reading, as the case may be. And so I picked up a copy of Glorious Appearing and read a fictionalized account of the end of time when Jesus would return to earth, defeat the armies of the Anti-Christ, and suck into heaven all those who gave themselves to Him before it was too late.

I tried to finish the book. I really did. It’s almost 400 pages long and I made it to the mid-200′s (wanted to stick around for Jesus to arrive). So if this is the 12th book in the series, then that makes 4800 pages of slogging before we can witness the end of time. But Holy Crap! If I had to read 4800 pages of this drivel, then screw the Rapture. I’d rupture first.

So why the allergic reaction?

Two reasons:

1. I’m a literary snob. I have an English lit. degree from Victoria College and it’s forever impaired my ability to read pulp fiction.

2. I’m a theological snob. I have a theology degree form Vic’s sister college (Emmanuel) and it’s forever impaired my ability to read anything that uses “blood” and “Jesus” in the same sentence.

So first let’s put the literary snob to work.

Glorious Appearing has two distinct voices, probably because it has two distinct authors (and no editorial effort to blend the two). Both voices come from the Keebler cookie–cutter fiction factory where cardboard characters (the Jenkins effect) are mixed in a batter of tedious sermonizing (the LaHaye effect), then drizzled in a glaze of awkward sentences and topped with a generous sprinkling of clichés.

There are a few distinctive characters. For example, there’s a rabbi. We know he’s a rabbi because his name is Chaim. There’s a tech guy named Chang. We know he’s a tech guy because … well … his name is Chang. There’s the Anti-Christ. We know he’s the Anti-Christ because he has anger management issues and was probably abused as a child.

Of course Middle-Aged Black Woman makes an appearance so that the Left Behind series maintains enough cultural diversity and political correctness to penetrate every conceivable demographic in the US. We know she’s MABW because she doesn’t speak the same stilted English as all the White, Jewish, Arab and Chinese characters. Instead, she says things like: “‘Bout three blocks from you, I reckon” and “How we all gonna fit in your cellar, anyway?” You just know that somewhere in the background the authors are itching to write in a watermelon and a stolen pair of Nikes.

It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyways): Jesus is white. We know he’s Jesus because his hair is snow white, he comes from the sky, rides a white horse, and wears a white robe. If Jesus were a woman, this would be a tampon commercial.

That’s about all there is by way of character development.

Now let’s sample the top 10 sentences from Glorious Appearing:

10. “His neck was stiff, and he had the feeling he would be unable to stand or even roll into a crawling position if his life depended on it. If someone didn’t find him soon, his life would depend on moving yet again. But that simply wasn’t in the cards.”

9. “The resistance thinks they own the surface above where we even now reside, but their options are gone. They have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.”

8. “He had had them rounded up, put in death camps, starved, tortured, beaten, humiliated with psychological warfare—you name it. That any survived was a miracle. That many became believers was something else … Apparently God’s going to play this one out for all it’s worth.”

7. “Abdullah had been put through the rigors of military training to where he was certified to fly jets of almost any type. Did his friends really think all Jordanians were so childlike and stupid that they would entrust a young man of limited mental capabilities to pilot fighter–bombers worth tens of millions of dinars? It was laughable.”

6. “The army had apparently underestimated the riders’ ability to stay aboard their mounts as the horses managed the steep terrain, and everything slowed to a halt. Those on the plain below kept coming, causing a traffic jam of biblical proportions.”

5. “Eleazar Tiberius, not that much older than Tsion had been but a much bigger, rotund man, had become a wonderful ally.”

4. “The Lord and His white-clad heavenly army hovered over them, and despite the trip, everyone appeared fresh and clean and none the worse for wear.”

3. “What was happening on the dirt ramp and the wood stairs dwarfed mass tragedies due to fire in crowded buildings.”

2. “He was no medical student, but he could tell something had sliced his carotid artery—no small problem.”

And now for the number 1 sentence from Glorious Appearing. (Remember that whenever Jesus speaks, his words kill the unbelievers):

1. “Rayford watched through the binocs as men and women soldiers and horses seemed to explode where they stood. It was as if the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin.”

Now let’s put the theological snob to work.

While it’s easy to be snobbish about the merits of the writing, it’s more difficult to keep my nose stuck in the air on matters of believing. In fact, my first observation is a caution against theological snobbery. My observation has to do with “tone.” Glorious Appearing features characters who engage in easy banter, who feel free, who believe in their rightness, and who are beset by regimented monolithic forces that have no access to their enlightened (and privileged) point of view. But isn’t this how we think too? Isn’t this the story of liberal education and culture in the West? Isn’t this the story of M*A*S*H, CSI, and the Matrix? And don’t we treat FEC as a regimented monolithic force? I think it’s important to acknowledge that we all seek out ways to affirm the centredness of our own point of view.

Why do we have this in common with FECs? Maybe it’s because we share with them a meta–narrative that lurks just below the surface—the meta-narrative of the Protestant Reformation, a story of conflict and secession that we have replicated in ever-smaller groupings of believers. Now, even where two or three (Protestants) are gathered, one will worry that the other two have formed an unthinking power–wielding regimented group bent on imposing its will. Or maybe it’s a response that runs deeper than our common Reformation heritage. Maybe it’s a deeply embedded social response that we’ve inherited from our Neolithic tribal ancestors—the vestiges of an ancient survival mechanism. Or maybe it’s a socialized egocentrism that’s necessary for the formation of a healthy group identity. Enough speculation. I offer these considerations only to support a word of caution against being flippant as I catalogue some of the theological themes which emerge form a reading of Glorious Appearing.

The Authority of Scripture

The Book quotes scripture at length—to such an extent that God should be acknowledged as a co-author and mailed royalty cheques. This is understandable, but it makes for a tedious read. The characters love their Bible. They love to read the Bible. They love to memorize long passages from the Bible. And they love to recite their biblical memory exercises ad nauseam.

The Importance of Prophecy

The truth of prophecies about the end of time (Daniel, selected apocalyptic passages from the Gospels, and the Book of Revelation) is affirmed by a syllogistic reasoning. The Prophets (especially Isaiah) foretold the coming of Christ. Christ came. The NT writers (also prophets) foretold the return of Christ at the end of time. Therefore … The problem is: the people writing about Jesus had the early Prophecies squarely in front of them and so were able to “write them true” retroactively. Ironically, that is precisely what the characters of Glorious Appearing do. So, for example, the troops of both God and the Anti-Christ are amassed. They’re armed to the teeth with all the latest in hi-tech weaponry. But Anti-Christ and Jesus both show up on horses. Why? Because that’s what a guy named John foretold as he was writing his tract 2000 years ago. In another scene, Anti-Christ sets out on a journey by horseback, then loads his horse into a plane and sends it ahead, gets in a Humvee, drives almost to his destination, gets back onto his horse, and enters the city on horseback. Why? Because John said he would in the Book of Revelation. Prophecy can make travel so inconvenient!

The Literal Truth of Scripture

On several occasions the book explicitly affirms the importance of scripture’s literal meaning. We’ve seen this above with Anti-Christ’s horse. But there’s a problem. There are some passages of scripture that defy even the most trenchant literalists. The rabbi Chaim worries about one such passage. It keeps him awake all night. Finally he has Chang hack into the world’s media centre (controlled by Anti-Christ—or maybe CNN) and broadcast to the world’s believers a little reflection on biblical exegesis. Yes, sometimes it is symbolic. The passage in question comes from the Book of Revelation. When Christ appears, there’s supposed to be a sword coming from his mouth which he uses to slay the unbelievers. Chaim explains that it is a symbolic passage. Christ doesn’t really stick a sword in his mouth. The sword is the Word of God. Here’s the symbolic interpretation: when Christ speaks, unbelievers who hear his words will drop dead—literally. This accounts for the superheated blood/exploding people passage I quoted earlier.

There is one thing Chaim doesn’t explain: how do you decide when to toggle from literal to symbolic modes of interpretation? This problem isn’t unique to FECs. In fact, it’s a problem that vexes every text-dependent religious system. Roman Catholics have answered the problem with the magisterium which stands as an equal and independent authority whenever scripture is silent or ambiguous. Liberal Protestants have sometimes created a magisterium all their own, looking to the epistemology which underlies scientific method, and to contemporary philosophical efforts to ground an ethic. Chaim appeals to common sense.

Scholarship/Unmediated Reading

Again, the book elicits a problem which extends far beyond the purview of fundamentalism: if interpretive method can draw out the plain meaning of scripture, then that plain meaning should be accessible to anyone. Nowhere is the desire for accessibility more celebrated than in the notion of a personal Saviour. When Jesus finally addresses the believers, each hears his/her own name and perceives the Saviour’s speech as a personal talk. But at the same time there are references to the importance of scholarship as a tool to affirm what people have already discovered through a plain reading of the text.

This ambivalence between scholarship and unmediated reading is not surprising amongst FECs. Ever since the Scope’s Monkey Trial, the media have portrayed fundamentalists as backward yokels. The response has been to create a sophisticated network of scholarly institutions to advance the FEC point of view. There’s Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, and the Dallas Theological Seminary, and most recently the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. You almost get the impression that scholarship is a form of image management as much as a pursuit worthy in its own right.

But this ambivalence is not unique to FECs; all religious thinkers face it. If their work is too heavily footnoted, some complain that it’s inaccessible or elitist. If, on the other hand, it relies too heavily on personal anecdotes and down-to-earth illustrations, others complain that it lacks intellectual credibility.

Christian Zionism

Drawing together all the themes mentioned above—the authoritative force of biblical prophecy interpreted literally with no external aids save common sense—and we have a recipe for what is arguably the most dangerous movement of our time—Christian Zionism. This movement is driven by the belief that the Jewish people, and Israel, are essential players in the events preceding the imminent return of Jesus. There are practical short-term consequences: 1) While FECs are numerically a minority group within the US, they have developed an pro-Israel lobby in Washington that has shaped US foreign policy in the Middle East. 2) Because Israel must be protected at all costs, FECs applaud the escalating militarization of the Middle East, a development which is consistent with biblical imagery. 3) It has become easy to deploy end–times imagery to characterize Palestinians and, by extension, all of Islam, as an army of darkness. This wouldn’t be the first time Scripture was used to promote racist policies.

However, if we take Glorious Appearing as a parable about the nature of history (or one version of it), then it stands as a cautionary tale for the long-term consequences of Christian Zionism. Jews take heed. The fulfillment of a FEC world view requires the conversion of Jews. At least a third of the world’s Jews must acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah before he will come again. This creates a huge level of anxiety amongst FECs who want to hurry things along. The characters exhibit a frustration at obstinate refusal and this emerges as violent fantasy:

“Frankly, he carried a bit of resentment, even disgust, for those who had waited this long.”

“More important than discussing the timing of Messiah’s return, however—which I can summarize in a sentence: I believe He will be here before midnight, Israel Time—is the spiritual state of my fellow Jews around the globe. If you have never listened before, lend me an ear this day. This is your last chance, your final warning, my ultimate plea with you to recognize and accept Jesus as the Messiah you have for so long sought.”

“Chang couldn’t help praying silently that just one of those bolts of lightning would find that tip and roast the enemy where he sat.”

If you can’t increase the rate of conversion, why not decrease the number of Jews? In the long run, do Jews really want support from these people? It seems a wee bit like a Faustian arrangement.

In The End …

It is the literary snob who passes judgment. All writing has in it the possibility of being an aesthetic gift to the world, adding something of beauty where there was none before. It is the aesthetic which drives all my reading. That accounts for the fact that I dive into works that my peers find difficult or pointless. I never tire of Genesis and Exodus, 1 Samuel and John—the storytellers. I read Chaucer and Shakespeare for fun. And as Frye has demonstrated by example, even scholarly works can convey an aesthetic sensibility. (I remember reading about a poet who chopped up fragments of Frye and delivered them at a poetry reading.) No matter the content, I’ll read anything as long as it’s well-written—the Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, Margaret Atwood. But without that aesthetic something, then the Word is dead.

I tried to read Glorious Appearing. I really tried.

SEMINARY MADE ME AN ATHEIST

In 2000, I began discernment. Within the United Church of Canada, discernment is a formalized process that potential ministers engage to “listen to the will of God.” I should have known right from the start that I’d be in trouble. For me, “the will of God” is kind of an inside joke. When I was a kid, we used to drive to summer reunions in Maine and New Hampshire where family from nearly every state on the eastern seaboard would gather to do all those New England things white families like to do together: dig for clams, boil lobsters, have a corn roast, sing songs around a piano—and go to church. You know what they say about families that pray together.

Every reunion, there was a funny game that played itself out between my grandfather and his brother-in-law, my uncle Quentin. Who would get to preach the sermon? Somewhere in the misty past, their Puritan ancestors met a fork in the religious road, and that fork presented two wildly different routes. My grandfather’s route had taken him to a liberal congregationalism. My grandfather came complete with a doctorate and a facility with ancient languages and a talent for careful reasoning. My uncle Quentin’s route had taken him to a gregarious Pentecostalism that didn’t require any formal training—just an openness to an infusion of the holy spirit.

While my grandfather quietly contemplated the consequences of every word and action, my uncle Quentin just let things happen. Whatever the outcome, it was God’s will. Late getting to the clambake? It was God’s will. Not enough money for the groceries? God’s will. Later in life, Quentin got his hand stuck in a snow blower and it chewed off two of his fingers. I’m sure he coped with the loss by saying it was God’s will.

My parents held the two men up to me as illustrations of a life lesson: relying solely on God’s will as an explanation for all of life’s vicissitudes was irresponsible. There’s room in life for our own will too, they told me. My grandfather saved his money, invested wisely, and retired to a modestly comfortable lifestyle. My uncle Quentin, on the other hand, was not always so comfortable. Although I don’t know the details, I was led to believe that in his retirement he was sometimes forced to rely on his children. It was God’s will.

My parents had planted the seeds of a healthy skepticism, and yet there I was: an adult considering a second career and being required by a discernment committee to ask myself what was God’s will for me. In discernment, I tried my very best. I wanted to be touched by God. I wanted to feel the brush of God’s breath on the back of my neck. I wanted the certain knowledge that God was moving with me in my life.

Whatever I may have wanted, a practical matter intervened. It became apparent to everybody accompanying me on this journey, but most especially to me, that I didn’t have the emotional toughness to cope with the demands of traditional ministry. It’s a simple fact of congregational life that there will always be somebody who disapproves of you; there will be something wrong with the clothes you wear, or the words you choose, or the way you live, or the people you hang with when you’re not working. With so many expectations tugging in so many directions, you have to be tough or you’ll be ripped apart.

It’s a paradox of congregational ministry that, although one of your roles requires authentic engagement with the people you serve, you can’t do your job without making yourself impervious. I’ve seen the wreckage. At one extreme are the ministers who have burnt out or cracked up or killed themselves; at the other extreme are the ministers who have encased themselves in a plastic shell and shake your hand with an oily palm and smile through jaded eyes. It’s a rare minister who can negotiate successfully between these extremes. In my discernment, I was forced to admit to myself that I am not so rare; I would end up amongst the wreckage.

In the meantime, I had already enrolled in seminary. I had started the M.Div. program at Emmanuel College in the University of Toronto. Having discerned myself out of ministry, what was I going to do with the courses I was taking? I completed the year, then took a year off—mostly to wallow in depression. There’s something to be said for wallowing—one of those wilderness experiences that seems frightening when you’re in the midst of it, but when viewed from a distance, proves life-giving.

I resolved to go back. This was MY will, not God’s. I would switch programs. I would take the same courses that prospective ministers take, but only to learn, not as training for a formal ministry. What the hell! I’d take only the courses that interested me. If they didn’t meet the program requirements, then screw the program. This was for ME, so what did it matter? I would go back simply to learn. I was amazed at how my renewed lack of purpose invigorated me. I attacked the material. I devoured it. I chewed it up and disgorged it. As an outsider, I became more engaged with these concerns than I’d ever felt as an insider.

That is where I encountered my own fork in the road, a third route diverging radically from those taken by my Pentecostal uncle and liberal grandfather. I found myself taking the hard and narrow path that leads to atheism. The balance of my time at seminary was an extended good hard look into the heart of my religious tradition. I found there an emptiness. It was time for me to reverse the onus.

The most aggressive amongst the religious challenge us to prove them wrong. Prove that our religious claims are false, they say. Prove that God doesn’t exist. However, there are two problems with this tack, one logical, the other, procedural. 1) It is impossible to prove a negative proposition. 2) The burden of proof rests on those who make the most outlandish claims. For forty-five years, I have been yearning after, crying out for, clamouring on behalf of, reasoning to, defending, apologizing, pontificating, yammering, scribbling for the sake of those outlandish claims. But now, with my efforts spent, I find my insights reduced to a single word: nonsense.

Why the shift? Why the gradual loss of faith? When pressed, most of my answers come off sounding like hyper intellectualized rationalizations. They sound plausible, like the reasons I might offer at the local debating society:

• There were the professors who introduced me to the soft edges of this discipline called theology.

• There was the dawning recognition that “seminary as academy” is less about learning or spiritual growth than about enculturation into a professional discourse.

• There was the weight of a religious heritage more steeped in oppression than in the liberative claims it makes for itself.

• There was also the recognition that if we take seriously the demand that we apply reason to our encounters with the world (as “seminary as academy” supposes we should) then inevitably we pose questions of the world that faith can’t answer without returning us to infantile modes of being.

However, these are abstract reasons. They are meaningless without the particularity of the idiosyncratic journey which gave them life. That is why I have offered here some of my journey as a narrative. My journey has happened within a particular religious tradition, within a sometimes eccentric family context, within a relatively narrow geographic region, within an even narrower world view. But I’ve only hinted at what is probably the most influential bit of my particularity: the persistent challenge of an unruly mood.

There is a sense in which relentless acute depression is a thoroughly immersive spiritual experience. It’s like fire. It’s like a flaming coal pressed to the lips. When all that remains are ashes, there’s nothing but to speak with honesty. There are other times, too, which punctuate my life with intense creativity. I’m in such a period now. This is not the frenetic disorganization of a manic episode—more a gentle pressure. The DSM IV has a name for it, but it’s boring—and inaccurate too.

There is an obvious relationship between mood and physical factors. Affect and effect. Spirit and body. This is something everybody experiences. Too much caffeine and you feel anxious. Too much alcohol and you feel blah. Too many carbs and you have a burst of energy followed by a letdown. Not enough sleep and you feel confused and disgruntled. On the positive side, there are many physical factors that improve your affect. Positive relationships, good sex, exercise, adequate sunlight, challenges that stimulate. It would appear, however, that I’m more vulnerable than most to these things—in both directions.

I share this tiny slice of my affective weirdness merely to point out why I have come to regard theism as nonsense. Embodiment is vital to a spiritual life. The Cartesian cogito ergo sum is wrong. Thinking does not define who I am. It is embodied thought that makes me who I am. Or, to be more accurate, it’s embodied feeling: I feel, therefore I am. There is an obvious corollary when that discovery gets transplanted into theological conversation: experience shows me that a deity understood as a disembodied spirit-being becomes untenable. Spirit without embodiment is like wind blowing in a vacuum. You can articulate the idea, but it’s incoherent in the real world.

There were many occasions during my time in seminary that pointed to a growing trend amongst (Protestant) theologians to reclaim the impulses of the Reformation from the spiritual poverty of the Enlightenment and Cartesian dualism. This trend is most obvious in the rise of ecotheology which rejects the idea that human beings have been set over and against the world, and promotes in its place the notion that humans are very much of the world and so cannot abstract themselves from their considerations of other creatures, ecosystems, and resources.

However, while at seminary, I heard precious little about what such an integrative view of the world would mean for our conceptions of divine beings.

Silence is not a surprising response.

RESISTING CHURCH

On Friday I did something I haven’t done in a while: I went to church. I’m a lapsed church-goer. Over the past couple years, I’ve attended a grand total of five religious services (not including funerals which typically are an insult to the term “religious”). I’ve never felt an affinity for the right; I’ve grown tired of the mainstream’s obsession with mere survival; and as for the left … well, even the left has its dogma, if only to assert that it has no dogma. Plus there’s this nagging matter of belief. Even if it takes the form of belief in a watered-down, non-theistic, numinous je ne sais quoi, the very mention of the word “belief” makes me want to clap my hands over my ears and shout: “Na, na, na, I can’t hear you.” Nevertheless I deliberately, and with malice aforethought, went to church.

To be truthful, I didn’t go to a church service; I went to a book study where a group of thirty people are discussing a collection of essays by a secular-ish but inspiringly ethical American writer.

The decision to go to church wasn’t a spontaneous impulse, like the decision to get a coffee, but was the result of a slow-dawning notion that first took hold exactly six months and nineteen days earlier. That seems awfully precise, but it’s true. It was six months and nineteen days earlier that I had attended a protest of the G20 Summit and later found myself caught in the middle of a riot, and in the midst of all this—the mass arrests, the application of brute force to silence dissent, the complicity of mainstream media, the indifference of a comfortable middle-class suburbia—that nagging thought took hold: church (and the synagogue and the mosque and the temple) is still the most effective vehicle for dissent.

I’m thinking of an idealized church. After all, there are churches of every stripe that have no perception of themselves as engaged with the most pressing issues of the day. Instead, they follow more inward-looking goals: pleasant worship, good music, social opportunities, and a cozy building. Churches can become institutions which preach power over liberation, conformity over creativity, and passivity over engagement. But I’m not interested in church that aligns itself with power. My ideal church is one which aligns itself with the aspirations of ordinary people. To the extent that secular institutions work to thwart such aspirations, my ideal church pits itself against secular institutions by creating a space for ordinary people to voice dissent.

On the weekend of June 25th, I saw hundreds of security forces dressed in riot gear. I witnessed an almost primitive display as those security forces thudded their boots in lockstep on the pavement and banged their night sticks on their shields. The brutish message was loud and clear. Protesters had gathered at Queen’s Park with a thousand different stories, but all these stories could be woven as threads in a single banner: we are ordinary people who have been hurt by you governments and you corporations who are bigger than we are.  My wife and I walked with these people and unwittingly found ourselves in the middle of a splinter group which chose to vent its frustration by smashing windows. As we heard the crack of hammers and two-by-fours against glass, I recall thinking that this is where church belongs. It is a thought which returned to me with mounting force during marches I joined in succeeding weeks to protest the victimization of vulnerable (mostly young) people who, for the most part, had been doing nothing more than exercising what is supposed to be a constitutionally protected right to engage in reasonable dissent.

At its best, church does dissent like nobody’s business, but its methods are non-obvious, and so we often forget that these things count as dissent.

Time

In the economic religion of neoliberalism, the guiding doctrine is efficiency, and waiting close by is efficiency’s handmaiden—time. (Yes, I’m being deliberately medieval in my choice of metaphor.)  To satisfy this religion’s fundamental tenet, life moves fast. By contrast, church moves slow. Church’s detractors talk about institutional inertia, fear of change, sticks in the mud, tradition for its own sake, blind conservatism. On the other hand, its proponents offer some variation on a theme of enduring values grounded in the timeless nature of God. But there’s a third way to think about church’s temporal stodginess—resistance.

Church is one of the few institutions with any memory. In addition, it’s one of the few spaces left where a community can exercise a collective pause. It is a place whose (often unacknowledged) purpose is to nurture wisdom. It can’t be such a place if it hops with the rest of the world onto the accelerating treadmill of latest technologies and trends. The long pause, the slow draw of breath, these are deep acts of resistance.

Consumption

I have never been in a church and heard the phrase “This service was brought to you by …” or “This event was made possible by the generous support of …” followed by the name of a corporate sponsor. What happens in a church is only ever made possible by the people in that church. And when I visit a church, I don’t ever find myself seized afterward by a desire to run to the local mall and shop for things. Although the modern church isn’t given to asceticism, it isn’t given to orgies of consumption either. Instead, it provides a respite from a world saturated by images of desire whose primary aim is to make us feel unhappy and dissatisfied with ourselves. Church becomes a site of resistance when it encourages people to seek personal and communal fulfillment and to find satisfaction in intangibles like friendship and service.

Authority

The word authority could be understood as the way in which power determines social relations within a community. But here, I mean something simpler, something more along the lines of “voice”. In a world that prefers to exercise authority in hierarchical relationships, a church becomes a site of resistance when it gives a voice to its people. I don’t mean “a voice” in the democratic sense of participation in community decision-making. I mean something more visceral than that. I have a voice when I feel I count, when I know that I will be heard. A church can give me a voice within the church community, but it goes further and commits an act of resistance when it also confers on me a feeling of entitlement to my voice, the feeling that my voice counts even beyond the walls of the church. Once church grants me that gift, it becomes difficult for secular institutions to strip me of it. I go out into the world with that sense of entitlement and speak to power with a voice of authority.

And so on Friday I went to church—to a book study group. Having been absent for so long, I was nervous at first, wondering in part about how I would be received, and wondering, too, about how I would manage my ambivalent feelings. The first part of my wondering was easy; I was warmly received. The second part of my wondering took longer to discern. At first, I revisited many of the feelings that had been problematic for me in previous years. There is a sense of regret that these kinds of events—and all of church for that matter—doesn’t attract young people. There is a frustration, too, at the group’s general discomfort with new ways of doing things. So, for example, while some people haven’t purchased the book because it’s not available in local book stores, I purchased my copy online in thirty seconds and arrived with copies loaded on both my Kobo ereader and iPod touch. And then there’s that ants-in-the-pants feeling I get as the conversation meanders around the room, and I start to wonder if maybe I’ve been teleported into Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves, sitting around a fire, sharing a pipe, and listening as the tribe’s elders mull over important concerns.

But that is only one side of the ambivalence I feel; the other side takes hold as I recognize that all these feelings of impatience and frustration have little to do with the group itself and far more to do with the fact that I am a child of a culture that has conditioned me to respond in these ways. I’ve been taught to grow impatient at the languorous thoughtful conversation. It is embarrassing for me to confess, but I can be as good a consumer/citizen as the next person, snapping up the latest gadget and quietly scorning the Luddites who don’t keep pace with the trends of the day. And it is disquieting to find myself in a group like this that has no leader, no one with a microphone or a conch or a sceptre to signal that they are in charge and will deliver a slick and programmed evening.

The ambivalence of my response is rooted in the recognition that mostly my feelings have nothing to do with this group and everything to do with impulses wound so tightly around my marrow they almost belong to my DNA. I want to cut them out of myself with a kind of self-administered surgery. Maybe the word that best describes this operation is resistance. I want to resist the culture-bred impulses that feed my ambivalent feelings.

What I have come to discover is that church as a site of resistance does not preach from some high pulpit, and to the extent that church tends to regard itself as a gargantuan book study group, the precise book, and the precise content of that book, doesn’t really matter. And in the case of this particular book study group, in a snowy suburb of Toronto, it could be one book or it could be another book, but that is of little importance when measured against the fact that whatever the book, the group is doing the work of a resisting church. It resists the illusory demands of an efficient world. It offers relief from relentless pitches to buy the latest useless goods. And it affirms to (extra)ordinary people that their voices matter. This kind of resistance lacks the immediacy of marching with a sign or smashing a window with a hammer, but like the tortoise, church is in this for the long run, and quietly reminding ourselves of that fact is, in itself, a fine act of resistance.

BELIEF IS A QUEER THING

Can queer theory be used as a tool to think about mental health? This is a question that has nagged me for a few years now, and in the fall, I had an opportunity to write about it for a course on liberation theology. I have been reluctant to post it, because, unlike most academic writing, I made this one deeply personal. I suppose I was afraid that if I shared my thinking too widely, it might feel a lot like walking naked through a shopping mall. However, I realize that, unless I make things personal, unless I’m willing to risk sharing from my own experience, then my writing loses two things. It loses a layer of credibility. And more importantly, it loses a layer of meaning.

In our liberation theology class, we were supposed to write reflection pieces based on the readings assigned for the week. The week devoted to queer theology included the following readings:

Goss, Robert, Jesus Acted Up: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto, (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993).

Heyward, Carter, “Coming Out: Journey without Maps,” Christianity and Crisis, 11 June, 1979, 153-156.

Tinney, James, “The Third World, the ‘Third Sex,’ and the Third Way,” transcript of address to the first International Conference of Third World Lesbian/Gay Christians, 1982.

Schneider, Laurel C., “Homosexuality, Queer Theory, and Christian Theology” Religious Studies Review 26, no. 1 (January 2000) : 3-11.

What interests me is the question of identity. Should I try to “pass?” Or, at the other extreme, should I not simply come out, but come out as militantly different?—a bold assertion of lunacy?

Enjoy the piece. I hope it makes you feel uncomfortable.

I shall begin at the end of our readings with a phrase from Goss. He speaks of “the scandal of particularity.”  He states that “[o]n Easter, God made Jesus queer in his solidarity with us. In other words, Jesus “came out of the closet” and became the “queer” Christ”. Is coming out a necessary step in identifying as queer? If so, then my investigation ends before it can begin. Certainly, Goss makes it explicit that coming out is necessary in order to do theologies of gay/lesbian liberation. But there does not appear to be a necessary connection between identifying as queer and doing a theology of gay/lesbian liberation. Perhaps, instead of a coming out, all that is needed to do queer theology is a declaration of difference, a public acknowledgment of one’s own scandalous particularity. The question then remains: does the declaration of difference have to relate to sexuality? If the differences which fuel a queer theology are restricted to matters of sexual identity, then a man who identifies as heterosexual may not be able to articulate anything liberative. But, given that queer theory aims to explode the givenness of categories, it seems plausible to queer the queer category by opening it up to issues which lie beyond sexuality. And so I shall proceed from my own scandalizing particularity.

Queer theology is contextual theology. All of this week’s authors work from within the experience of sexual expression beyond hetero–normativity. While Carter Heyward proposes an analytic method that avoids biography, nevertheless she makes it clear that she is a thirty–three year old graduate theology student, self–described variously as lesbian and bisexual (perhaps this ambiguity is deliberate). The title of the article by James S. Tinney makes it clear that he proceeds from biography: “Struggles of a Black Pentecostal.”  Although the excerpts from Jesus Acted Up do not speak to the experience of Robert Goss, his writing is still rooted in the communal biography of the people for whom he speaks—with accounts of the early struggles against homophobic violence to the ravages of AIDS. I take my cue from these authors and offer my own story as a point of departure for considering what they present.

I am queer by analogy. My queerness is very much rooted in issues of identity, though not in issues of sexual identity (although I do not dismiss the possibility that sexuality is integral to my particular concern). For more than twenty years, I have struggled with a major mood disorder. This is my dirty secret. This is the scandal of my particularity. Like gays and lesbians, I can tell my coming out story. This is not the story of the day I first acknowledged publicly what had formerly seemed inconceivable—that I labour with mental illness; instead, it is the story of the day I first acknowledged publicly that my illness is untreatable—certainly untreatable from within the context of a medical hegemony which understands treatment primarily as therapy for acute concerns. On that day, I discovered that, although untreatable, I could still find relief. On that day, I claimed for myself mental illness as part of my identity—no more apologies—no more self-conscious squeamishness—no more self–hatred. In effect, I declared: “I’m crazy. I’m here. Get used to it.”  I draw enormous support from queer theory. I do not believe it is a coincidence that Foucault applied his methodology to both sexuality and to mental illness. Nor, it would seem, is it a coincidence that “homosexuality” was once catalogued as a mental illness in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). It would anger me to find that queers reject my claim for queerness, for if I were marginalized even from the margins, where would I go?

Just as writers write in ways that are conditioned by their contexts, so I must read this week’s readings in ways that are conditioned by my context. I read in order to glean insights which may be helpful to me. This is not self–centered. I hope that the conclusions I draw may, in turn, be held in conversation with those whose primary concern is sexual identity. Then, when I talk back to queer writing, it may hear things grounded in the particularity of my context which it may find meaningful in its own.

Beginning with “Coming Out: Journey Without Maps,” Carter Heyward offers me two points of reflection. First, she acknowledges the givenness of our sexuality, but given from such a wide base of sources that the notion of clearly defined sexual categories becomes impossible. Categories like “gay” and “straight” diminish us. “For these categories can be boxes; they can be imposed from without, not truly chosen, not reflective of who we are or might have been or might become”. While sexual identity may have a givenness, Heyward seems to imply that the validity of a descriptive category comes from its chosenness. By analogy, it is one thing for the medical establishment to impose its terminology on the basis of often ambiguous criteria set out in the DSM; it is quite another for me to choose for myself the label which I will use to claim (part of) my identity.

Heyward’s second point of reflection comes from refiguring sexuality, not as an accidental feature of living which can be foregone if necessary, but as “the one most vital source of our other passions”. The intimacy of sexual sharing reminds us in the most basic way that we are not alone. She uses this discovery to couple love with justice. “[J]ustice is the moral act of love”. This is a truth I have confirmed negatively. In the deepest of depressions, confined within an intensive observation unit, I visited the extremities of dissociative experience. Not only was I detached from those around me, I was detached even from myself. I could not identify myself in a mirror. But most disturbing was the fact that I could feel almost nothing. There was one feeling, however, which could give me energy—rage. Rage is the opposite of justice. Rage is a lashing out of incoherence. Disconnected and angry, love was impossible.

The pathology of the dissociative experience finds its mirror in the modern western description of mind/body dualism. In “The Third World, The ‘Third Sex,’ and the Third Way,” James S. Tinney rejects this traditional dualism, advocating an integrative view of embodiment which no longer treats spirit and body as warring opponents. Desire is both natural and good. The sexual fulfillment of desire is symbolic of union with God. This is reminiscent of Heyward’s view that sexual intimacy persuades us that we are not alone. From the perspective of psychiatry, the fact that one can feel anything at all is good; the fact that one can feel the touch of God is blessing. But Tinney is well aware of the psychiatric harm of enforced dissociation. He notes that the traditional Christian teachings which equate sex and sin reduce God to “trivial legalism.”  More pressing are the “5 D’s” of ethical concern which arise from systems of evil. It is here that Tinney’s experience intersects with mine, for many of his “D’s” are manifestations of a “D” I hold for myself—depression. He writes of dread, which is “related to feeling that ‘nobody wants me,’ or ‘I’m not good to anybody,’ or ‘I’m not attractive.’”  These statements typify the beliefs which permeate depressive thinking. Tinney also names “despair that causes suicide in our gay community.”  Suicide is the most complete act of dissociation.

In his introduction to Jesus Acted Up, Robert Goss presents the notion of a gay/lesbian liberation theology which “begins with resistance and moves to political insurrection.” However, Goss must answer the critique that it is impossible to collapse the categories of gay and lesbian experience. Hence the value of the term queer. There are elements of common experience among gays and lesbians—homophobia and heterosexism, and the fact of political struggle. Queer is a term which enfolds these commonalities while acknowledging sexual diversity. But queer is more than a descriptive term; it is a verb describing acts of political dissidence which shake up institutions and blur the boundaries which such institutions seek to enforce. Queer is also about language, challenging the complacency which allows discursive practices designed to exclude. Part of its intent is to retrieve words which have come to be regarded as demeaning of those whose sexuality is different—words like “queer” and “faggot” and “faerie.”  “Queer is transformed from a word coined against gay men and lesbians into an empowering, postmodern word of social rebellion and political dissidence.”

Goss describes the situation immediately following World War II, as gay men and lesbians began to assert themselves against homophobic institutions. Goss goes so far as to claim that, in its treatment of gay men and lesbians, the military service “created gay and lesbian bodies.”  I am inclined to apply a more moderate interpretation to events. While the forced outing of large numbers of gay men and lesbians in the military service undoubtedly provided an early impetus to the process of forming discrete categories of sexual identity, nevertheless, this was probably a more organic process unfolding over several decades, emerging almost as a dialogue between events of resistance and events of oppression. I accept Goss’s conclusion: “Gay and lesbian identities were produced from the social effects of homophobic discursive practice.”  Initially, acts of resistance were accompanied by demands for acceptance as normal, but with the Stonewall riots, those demands became calls for acceptance of difference. What began as an assertion of rights within a given social structure became a political movement aimed at reshaping that structure.

The shift in demands which followed the Stonewall riots finds a fuller articulation in Laurel C. Schneider’s article, “Homosexuality, Queer Theory, and Christian Theology.”  Queer theory “take[s] on the whole paradigmatic system of meaning that produces heterosexuality and homosexuality in the first place and tend[s] to view religious ideas as cultural means of production for that system.”  Queer theology may be necessary if gay and lesbian liberation theologies are to avoid “the mimesis that conditions homosexual inclusion in a heteronormative communion.”  Justice is not merely fulfillment of the right to be treated as an equal, but fulfillment of the right to be honoured in one’s difference.

Can this shift be transposed to the experience of mental illness? Schneider certainly entertains the possibility, asking if queer thinking can “encompass a dynamic constellation of interrelated issues” including “disease politics.”  The paradigm of mental health/illness is governed by a DSM normativity which is understood primarily in terms of behaviour. If behaviour draws a person beyond the American Psychiatric Association’s paradigm, then therapeutic procedures are indicated in order to draw the person back within the paradigm—a return to the psychonormative communion. Biblical models suggest the same approach within theological discourse. Jesus heals. In one way or another, we are sick, and Jesus brings us back to wholeness. We presume that healing of the body is a metaphor for a healing of the spirit. This is most apparent in the story of the blind man, Bartimaeus. The recovery of sight is customarily understood as a declaration that, among other things, Jesus has come into the world with the gift of insight. But what if the defect is so closely linked to the spiritual that the two are indistinguishable? What if the defect relates to mood, or anxiety, or visions? Of what use is a metaphor then? We typically understand the Biblical paradigm of wholeness as in opposition to the fractured frame of our fallen selves. The resurrection promise is raised up against the body broken on the cross. And so, for example, when Jesus speaks of anxiety and advises that we not worry for tomorrow, he could just as easily prescribe benzodiazepines, because psychiatric and religious normativities are aligned. But what if the “patient” is unresponsive to either treatment? What if the demon cannot be cast out, or controlled by pharmaceuticals? What if the vision, far from transforming a man into a believer, prompts him to yell at the top of his lungs? In these situations, wholeness is impossible within our accustomed paradigm(s). However, that does not preclude the possibility of wholeness. But it may require the recasting of the paradigm(s). It may require queer health. It may require queer religion.

I’m crazy. I’m here. Get used to it.

DEMYSTIFYING CAMP

My wife is an active alumnus of a summer camp in Longford Mills on the northeastern shore of Lake Couchiching. Every fall, staff, alumni, and friends of the camp gather for a weekend of work and fun. The object is to close down the camp for the winter, taking in docks, storing boats and equipment, cleaning out cabins, clearing out dead wood and chopping it. One of my chores was to rake leaves. There are a lot of leaves in a forest, which means the raking takes a long time. It’s repetitive and, as happens with me and repetitive tasks, my mind starts to wander. I had been reading a book by Mircea Eliade the night before and that helped fuel my wandering mind. Actually, my mind never really wanders; it’s more like a NASCAR race with a pileup against a wall.

In the inside lane, we had this line of thought: I was thinking of my own camp experience as a kid. I didn’t go to Camp Couchiching; I went to a rival camp which wasn’t half as cushy as this camp (we slept in tents instead of in cabins). In particular, I was thinking of how oblivious I had been to the contributions that other people made to my camping experience. That’s the way it is for kids. Things seem to happen as if by magic. Meanwhile grownups, many of whom we may never know or meet, are busy working in the background to ensure that children—not necessarily our children—can have the best possible experience. Children, especially when they’re young, live in a kind of pleasant fog. As they get older, they become increasingly aware that their experiences belong to a wider social world. They know there are counsellors and program directors and a camp director, but it isn’t until they are much older that they learn about the board of directors and affiliations with the wider world, which includes a large group of volunteers and hangers-on who are simply glad to lend a hand from time to time. There is a sense in which we can say that, as campers age, they experience a demystification of camp. The pleasant fog evaporates and they become aware of themselves as individuals within a larger matrix.

The Wizard’s Levers

We talk a lot about demystification. Although Barthes said it was an outmoded strategy two generations ago, it may well be a necessary stage in the postmodern approach to all our social institutions. I have written about it on this blog in reference to religion, especially (surprise, surprise) when I was studying at a seminary. Certainly atheists love to engage in religious demystification. They’re like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, pulling aside the curtain to reveal that the pyrotechnics aren’t magic, but the manipulations of a burnt-out vaudeville fraud. More recently, I’ve been tracking the demystification of the printed word. The appearance of ereaders and the development of digital formats has accelerated a trend at work in Western culture since the invention of the printing press: the gradual erosion of the printed word as a magical bearer of meaning. Call it the secularization of print. Once, books were the repositories of sacred wisdom. Even as they became profane objects, like novels, texts, and non-fiction discussions of issues in our world, they retained an aura of authority. If a person quoted a book to support his own position, some of that authority passed from the book to that person’s lips. The rise of the ebook has merely made obvious, like the curtain pulled back from the wizard, that authority does not live in the print; it has nothing to do with the weight of the paper; nor the art of the cover; nor the display in the bookstore. Just as it has been unequivocally demonstrated that the Bible is the result of a highly fallible and utterly human process, so too the revolution in digital publishing has made it clear that books more generally have no magical authority. Books are the accumulation of words from highly fallible people who burp and fart just like you and me. They have become utterly demystified.

The problem is that we don’t like this state of affairs. We liked it better when we could appeal to the Bible as if it would settle everything for us. We liked it better when we could take up a book and cite it as if an aphorism was all it took to win an argument. We feel nostalgia for the days before demystification, just as I felt nostalgia, while raking leaves, for a time in my childhood when camp magically appeared each year just for me.

The Hostile Tone of Public Conversation

There is another problem, too, and that has to do with tone. I note a common tone in the quality of conversations that play out in both religion and publishing. At best, it is patronizing. More often, it is hostile and divisive. So, for example, a good number of atheists find religious people frustrating. Science, empiricism, rational thought. All of these modern approaches thoroughly skewer religious claims. Religious types don’t live in the real world; they’re ruining it for the rest of us by poisoning public discourse, sticking their noses in places they don’t belong. At the same, early adopters in the digital world look at traditional publishing houses and call them Luddites. People who prefer paper books are fetishists or are too ossified to adapt.

Imagine if the volunteers at the camp work weekend assembled and passed a resolution to adopt such a tone. Be it resolved: campers who refuse to see all that goes on behind the scenes will be ridiculed next summer; they will be taunted and systematically told they lack insight; and they will be forced to spend time doing some of that work instead of swimming with their friends and roasting marshmallows by the fire. But we never make such a resolution, do we? We are happy to stand behind the curtain with the wizard and keep out of sight. The reason, I think, is that nothing hinges on forcing the demystification. There is nothing of our personal identity at stake in what we do. Our egos do not demand of us that we go to the camp next summer and tell all the campers what we did the previous fall, how we require their acknowledgment. On the contrary, the tone of the weekend is one of generosity. We are present for them, whoever they may be, and not for ourselves.

My analogy is inexact. It seems to imply that I think of those who resist demystification as childlike; religious people are intellectually naïve; defenders of traditional publishing are just being overly nostalgic. This is a limitation of my analogy, not of my argument. I would suggest that the same generosity of tone ought to seep into our more politicized conversations. If we choose to engage the modern with demystifying approaches, we might inquire first as to our own motives. Do we do this because we believe there is some neutral social benefit to be had? Or are we more concerned with private personal interests?

Eliade & Rites of Initiation

This takes me to Eliade. The book I was reading was Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries: The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities. Eliade was a Romanian pioneer of comparative religion who wrote from the 1930′s to the 1960′s. He was interested in the way insights from other disciplines, like sociology, psychology and anthropology, could be leveraged to illuminate religious concerns. He felt it important to study the religious practices of non-Western (especially indigenous) cultures, anticipating an increasingly globalized culture in which the West would be forced into close proximity with the Other. In his view, the West had a choice in how it handled these encounters, but that choice was contingent upon the extent to which it educated itself and empathized with those it viewed as Other. Following the work of anthropologists like Margaret Mead, Eliade gave a great deal of attention to rites of initiation, both into adulthood and into secret societies.

One could argue that summer camp is a Western appropriation of the rites of initiation which appear almost universally in indigenous cultures. A rite of initiation is an inherently demystifying process. It introduces the novitiate into the secrets of the group. He becomes the bearer of a fuller knowledge which he in turn transmits to future novitiates. Campers discover that there are older people who do things in off-season gatherings to help maintain the camp for the following year. In succeeding years, many of these campers, as older people, do things in off-season gatherings, and so it goes. The curious thing is that the precise content of the secrets doesn’t matter (it could be leaf-raking or log-splitting). From the perspective of a scholar in comparative religion, what matters is the discovery that the rite of initiation functions identically across cultures. Its purpose is to establish membership in the group. It’s purpose is to affirm identity, not to affirm a specific knowledge except as that knowledge contributes to identity.

Because I have no great stake in the knowledge of camping, it is easy for me to detach myself from its mysteries. That’s why it is easy for me to use the initiation rite of the summer camp as an illustration. It might not be so easy if I were an atheist. I might be more attached to the particular details of atheism, so much so that I might miss the fact that the ability to recite the particular details of atheism is itself part of a rite of initiation. Similarly, a Republican has her talking points. And a Progressive Christian has his apologetics. And so on. The attachment to content is, in part, an affirmation of social identity. This is my tribe! The irony, at least for the atheist, is that the rite of initiation to establish group membership has a religious provenance.

Death of the Self and Rebirth

Eliade observes the basic schema of the ritual: it involves the death of the old self and the rebirth of the new. An example from Western culture: hazings are rituals designed to destroy the neophyte’s former identity. They are symbolic human sacrifices. Sometimes, the group takes that schema literally, engaging in actual human sacrifice or in ritual killings. For example, some modern gangs demand the commission of a murder as the cost of initiation.

It could be argued that the harsh tone of debate in much of contemporary Western discourse follows the same schema and has acquired its edge precisely because it seeks to fulfill a symbolic sacrifice. The atheist cannot truly claim membership within the tribe unless he emulates the kind of bloodletting that a Christopher Hitchens achieves when he sets upon a hapless Christian or Muslim fundamentalist. We witness the same ferocity in contemporary political exchanges, in debates between copyright law-and-order types and “free culture” advocates, and most recently in the kind of salvos between traditional print publishers and advocates of the self-publishing ebook market. In fact, pick just about any cause that receives play in our media and you are likely to find Eliade’s schema lying below the surface. We daily affirm our group affiliations through the ritual slaying of our opponents or through ordeals in which we die to our old selves and rise again to the new.

Nowadays, our instrument of choice may be the demystifying power of science and rationalism, but we have never been so religious.

Part Seven

Reading Culture

HAPPY PISS CHRIST EASTER

The Piss Christ scandal reminds me of the chocolate Jesus scandal, only this scandal has gone one better … or two … or three. In the case of the chocolate Jesus, the scandal was the work itself. The Catholic League fell into conniptions about a representation of Jesus which, had it been cast in bronze, would have attracted no notice, but, because it was cast in chocolate, provoked an allergic reaction. Its response was on a par with the various Islamic fundamentalists who went bonkers over Danish cartoons which portrayed the prophet Mohammed. The Piss Christ has been around long enough to attract similar responses. However, this latest scandal does not rest in the image itself, but in the act of vandalism perpetrated against the image. The vandalism can be viewed as performance art. This carries us into a second order of fundamentalist lunacy—maybe even a third order when you consider that the vandalized image is not the original but a limited edition print—maybe even a fourth order when you consider that the gallery owner has chosen to exhibit the Piss Christ in its damaged state as if it were a fresh work unto itself. It’s as if, this Eastertide, the god of art has breathed fresh life into a moribund work, and we, the slathering horde who crave meaning in our lives, have something new to cling to and overinterpret to our heart’s content.

I don’t pretend to know anything about semiotics, but clearly this is a gold mine. Religion Dispatches and HtmlGiant each offer an excellent exegesis, one sacred, the other, secular. What both articles leave unanswered is the question: Why? Why would a group of fundamentalist Christians interpret the work as a sacrilegious portrayal of the Christ when most viewers (supported by the artist’s own remarks) see a critique of sacrilegious practices and a call to resacralize what has been desecrated? After all, this is not a plastic Jesus, nor is it a plastic Jesus soaking in urine, but a photograph of a plastic Jesus soaking in urine. It is not a thing, but a commentary on a thing. Why do these fundamentalist Christian vandals not see beyond the thing to the commentary?

The clue to a possible answer lies in Milan Kundera’s remarks about kitsch as a denial of shit. Presumably his remarks can be extended from shit to piss. Fundamentalism conflates theology and an aesthetic of kitsch. Fundamentalism is an absolute denial of shit that applies with equal force to life and to art. So, for example, the only answer to death is bodily resurrection, while tragedy (in the classical and Shakespearian sense of the word) is unthinkable. Its “theology as kitsch” finds expression in bestsellers about children who have been to heaven, and it sees its visual equivalent in worship powerpoint slides that favour sunsets and the colour pink. It is a theological impossibility for saints to poop. Although fully human, Jesus could never have had sex because that would have involved a nasty emission of bodily fluids. And that kiss in the Garden of Gethsemane could never support a homoerotic reading because same-sex love is icky.

I find it astonishing that, even amongst mainstream Christians, the resurrection is a line most will not cross. They are willing to subject everything else to deep interpretation, but when Easter arrives and they confront the language of resurrection, their spiritual questing stutters to a halt. They swallow the fish, hook, line and sinker. Easter becomes a time, not of renewal or rebirth in sync with changes in the natural world, but of regression to an infantile state in which they can surrender all personal responsibility and rest in the absolute certainty that they will be cared for by some supernatural parental figure. Meanwhile bunnies cavort in the grass and chicks drop chocolate eggs in our lap.

There is a sense in which all Christianity, even in its liberal iterations, panders to the emotionally immature. Nevertheless, I believe it is possible to acknowledge the fact of death as an absolute finality without either a devolution into “theology as kitsch” on the one hand, or “theology as despair” on the other.

Perhaps that is why Serrano’s Piss Christ is so compelling. It embraces both the kitsch (the plastic Jesus) and the despair (the piss) and transforms them within a wider aesthetic (the Cibachrome photograph). Through art, it suggests a theological possibility:  the affirmation of a spiritual maturity that comes from integrating rather than denying our impulses. At times, we all are afraid. At times, we all live in denial. At times, we all grow angry and smash things in acts of betrayal. Yet we all have within us the capacity to draw these impulses to ourselves, and in doing so, to become whole.

Perhaps surprisingly, then, I find in the Piss Christ an Easter Christ, pointing to the possibility of wholeness.

ANTIDOTE TO THE SUPERMODERN

As someone who claims to blog thematically about “the power of words” but occasionally interrupts his wordiness with photographs, I find it heartening that Geoff Dyer should open his latest collection of writings, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, with a section devoted to photographers and their work. Whatever his rationale, I want to adopt it. In his introduction, he notes “the unruly range of [his] concerns” and describes himself as a “gate-crasher” into disciplines (like jazz) about which he has much interest but little knowledge. He assumes the posture of Hazlitt—to “loiter—with no intent of entering—outside of the academy, unburdened by specialization … and the rigors of imposed method.”  And so he offers his writings in five discrete sections: Visuals, Verbals, Musicals, Variables, and Personals. What ties these themes together, or what demands that they be tied together, is the fact that they all issue from a single personality. That fact provides the essays with an overarching narrative logic; the reader is on a voyage of discovery, the slow revelation of a person who occupies a unique space in the world.

In two of his essays, Dyer draws on Marc Augé’s Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. In the first, Dyer describes his brief stint as a Def Leppard groupie when the band played a concert in Seoul. He suggests that the members of Def Leppard are residents of the supermodern world, where one hotel looks the same as any other, as do the airports, restaurants, limousines, and concert venues. One might go so far as to say that Def Leppard plays supermodern music, the heavy metal equivalent of elevator muzak (can you hum any Def Leppard tunes off the top of your head?)  And, as the punch line for this piece, it appears that people are also interchangeable. What goes unsaid is that the notion of supermodernity may also apply to writing, which has detached itself from a rootedness in place and wings its way around the globe through fiber optic cables and satellite transmissions.

Dyer continues in this supermodern vein with “Sex and Hotels”, an essay about the relationship between the generic luxury hotel and pornography. By their very non-placeness, luxury hotels are the ideal locale to view pornography, the ideal setting to film pornography, and they somehow elicit in their guests long-buried sexual proclivities. The Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal is a case in point. Whatever the legality of his exchange with a chambermaid in a New York City hotel, it is clear that he was engaged in behaviour that he is unlikely to repeat with his wife in their matrimonial residence. Again, one can infer from Dyer that the supermodern non-placeness of internet writing evokes similar pornographic tendencies. The utter sameness of Huffpo articles elicits from readers a kind of cultural masturbatory response.

Anybody devoted to quality writing and original thought will feel inclined to resist the supermodern tendencies of internet writing. Which makes the intrusion of personality a relief. By “personality”, I don’t mean a gushing effusiveness or belligerent ranting, but something more subtle, a presence in the writing that hints at a distinctive world view mediated by unique experience. While Dyer is deliberately autobiographical in the “Personals” section (we learn whether or not he had sex on his first date with the woman who later became his wife), we detect hints of the autobiographical even in his more scholarly pieces (it is not without good reason that he bears a strong affinity for the novels of D. H. Lawrence).

Which returns me to the question I posed at the outset: how does a writer justify devoting more than a quarter of the words in his new book to a visual medium (and another significant chunk to music)? The short answer is that writing has to be about something. I grow tired of the solidly crafted work from writers freshly squeezed out of MFA programs. It’s like drinking air from an empty crystal goblet. For Dyer, writing is the occasion to share other commitments—commitments which may well be more important than the writing itself.

But there may be a more complicated answer. Photographers provide Dyer with another example of what appears to be a persistent concern: the supermodern erosion of discrete experience. His essay on Robert Capa is almost elegiac. There was in Capa’s work during WWII a thisness which a handful of other war correspondents approximated but which has disappeared since the advent of digital reportage with its clarity and gruesome explicitness. Now, war photographers take the same risks, but do so for the sake of a visual record which is indistinguishable from pornography. They’re in the field for the cum kill shot, since that’s what sells papers (and pays their salaries). A photo by Capa is a photo of Capa or at least sufficiently distinctive in the view it presents that we can’t help but note Capa’s presence in the work.

Geoff Dyer aspires to the same thing. But because he doesn’t own a camera, he captures his experience with words. A photograph or an essay, it doesn’t really matter. When done well, both draw us into the distinctiveness of the experience they present and buttress us against an onslaught of the supermodern.

PICO IYER, MULTICULTURALISM AND TORONTO

I first encountered the name, Pico Iyer, last year while reading Geoff Dyer’s latest book, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. Dyer refers to him while writing about the nowhereness of hotels and airports, locales that have become emblematic of the global era. To my chagrin, I discovered that Iyer’s is not a new voice; he has been publishing books for more than twenty-five years. How had I overlooked him? Months later, I stumbled across Iyer’s The Global Soul in a used bookstore on Johnson St. in Victoria, a locale that is emphatically not emblematic of the global era. Now that the world seems all abuzz with Pico Iyer—essays in the New York Times and a new book released this month—I think it’s worth visiting his earlier work.

The Global Soul makes for unsettling reading not so much for what is in the book as for what might have been in the book had its publication been delayed for five years. Published in 2000, it provides us with a snapshot of an emerging global culture just before 9/11. I read it with an archaeologist’s relish for a simpler age when people were more trusting and less anxious, when people could pass through airports without having to submit to body scans and pat downs. In 2000, there were cell phones and email and internet technology, but no hint yet of the inaptly named social media. There was no flaming, no comment trolls, none of that ceaseless and polarizing chitter-chatter that has turned much of our public interactions into a barrage of ad hominem attacks.

As that rare creature, the native Torontonian, I find The Global Soul particularly poignant because Iyer’s longest, and perhaps warmest, chapter is an extended meditation on multiculturalism and the way it plays out in Toronto. I think it’s a universal response that when a non-native non-resident tries to understand life in your home town, you prick up your ears. You want to know how you are perceived elsewhere in the world. Iyer’s concern here is to ask whether multiculturalism is real or just some made-up anti-myth which we apply to ourselves to keep the newcomers happy while we natives surreptitiously impose our culture upon them. Iyer wants desperately to believe in the “city as anthology”. He observes: “Toronto … seemed to me a much more hopeful and witty vision of a world not conforming to the old categories without dwindling into a universal Nowhereland …”

Iyer may be viewing the city through rose-coloured glasses or reading his own needs into the landscape, except that he demonstrates no qualms about writing scathing criticism when he feels so inclined. In the next chapter, he savages Atlanta. It is “a small town’s idea of what a big city should be.” It is global “by virtue of being featureless.” Its buildings are “all the interchangeable props of an International Style that could, in its latest incarnation, be called Silicon Neo-Colonial.” Its deepest division is not racial but “between those who were willing to buy into the belief that profit curves could be the answer to suffering and those who were not.” Given his assessment of Atlanta, one assumes that if Iyer had not liked Toronto, he would have said so.

One of the things Iyer gets about Toronto is the deep sense of irony that pervades local culture. Perhaps this is a defence against being (mis)taken for an American city. This gives rise to an unease “expressed with a good humour I wouldn’t expect to find in England”. The reference to England is curious since ironic humour strikes me as more of a Scottish habit and for precisely the same reason. Like the Scots, we must steel ourselves any way we can against an overbearing cultural presence south of our border.

I learned early on that many Americans are deaf to our tone of irony. In high school, I remember music exchanges with American high schools. We would feel inferior when faced with marching bands that performed with military precision. When it came our turn to play, at least a couple of our students would be stoned. We’d play horribly. We’d laugh afterwards and the teacher would accuse us of being apathetic. Maybe we were apathetic. Mostly, the experience made us cringe. We’d rather share half-assed jokes than perform anything with military precision—music, football, or war for that matter. Or consider the Canadian reputation for politeness. It is astonishing how many times I hear my fellow citizens say “I’m sorry.” However, outsiders (or at least those without an ear for irony) may miss that our apologies are often delivered like a knife in the back.

Although Iyer doesn’t make the point, at least not explicitly, he suggests a connection between irony and multiculturalism. His characterization of irony as “a chastened sense of history” anticipates his observation “that if the essential question that America asks of every newcomer is, “What will you do with your future?” Canada adds to it the more difficult one: “What will you do with your past?” Irony gives us the detachment to entertain a twofold vision. While we can appreciate the optimism of America’s forward-looking gaze, irony gives us imaginative space where we can maintain that part of our identity which lies behind.

Oddly (for someone born here), I share that twofold vision. Recently, I’ve reconnected with friends from high school, many of the same ones who went with me on those music exchanges to American high schools. Now, we share with one another in ways that were impossible as teenagers. In this sharing, I have discovered how I was perceived as one of the few Toronto-born WASPs in my circle of friends: I belonged in a way that none of them did. What is curious (ironic even) is that I perceived myself as an outsider too. I perceived my normal as Iyer’s multiculturalism, a linguistic and cultural soup and me floating in the broth like one more ingredient.

Twelve years after The Global Soul first appeared, do Iyer’s claims for multiculturalism in Toronto bear up under scrutiny? Undoubtedly things have changed. 2010 was a benchmark year for us in several ways. In 2010, Toronto ceased to have a dominant ethnicity. We are all minorities now, although I suspect the locus of political and economic power remains with WASPs. Also in 2010, Toronto hosted the G20 summit. Twenty world leaders were whisked into the downtown core for thirty-six hours, then whisked out again at a cost of more than $1bn. Nineteen thousand police and paramilitary personnel secured the event and effected the largest mass arrests in Canada’s history. At the time, something felt different, but I couldn’t characterize it. On reading Iyer, I wonder if the difference lay in an absence of irony. None of this belonged to Toronto. Even the protests seemed out of place. In the grand tradition of colonialism, the protesters came here mostly from elsewhere to do our protesting for us, deploying their globalized Black Bloc brand of tactics without regard for local nuance, which is, well, ironic, given that they described themselves as anti-colonial anarchists.

Finally, in 2010, Toronto elected mayor Rob Ford, a conservative in every sense of the word. Although Ford claims to be motivated solely by economic considerations, his “derail the gravy train” brand of fiscal restraint has harsh consequences for new arrivals and ethnic minorities. For example, Ford has slashed the public library budget and wants to eliminate city-run daycare spaces, two services which are invaluable for people trying to get a foothold in this city. Again, drawing on Iyer, I note that one of the things which distinguishes Ford from his predecessors is tone deafness. He does not hear irony. Or, to switch metaphors, he lacks the twofold vision that would allow him to respect our past even as we move forward. His inability (or is it his refusal?) to hear irony also denies him the capacity to empathize with those who inhabit hybrid identities.

Although Iyer’s perceptions of Toronto still apply, I think it’s fair to say that recent changes indicate an erosion of multiculturalism even as the city becomes more multi-ethnic.

If you find my assessment harsh, I’m sorry.

REMEMBRANCE DAY FUNDAMENTALISM

Today I heard someone refer to Remembrance Day as an expression of civic religion. If so, it’s a religion without the benefit of theologians. In our more conventional expressions of religion, theologians help in the task of interpreting religious expression, of giving it meaning and depth and context. Remembrance Day has none of that. This morning, I passed a makeshift (at least I hope it’s makeshift) cenotaph on the field in front of University College at U. of T.—a plain grey monument with the words lest we forget and a cross on its face. It suggests several things:

1) Remembrance Day is not really an expression of civic religion but an extension of Christian belief and ritual;

2) Because the cross is also a sword, it draws on Christianity’s historical alignment with power;

3) Within this civic religion, the chief sin is forgetfulness.

Remembrance Day is not just an expression of Christian religion, but adopts (or mimics?) an acutely conservative form of Christian religion. It invites us to celebrate a blood sacrifice which has produced a debt we can never repay but for which we must nevertheless give thanks. Just as the blood of Christ is a ransom which purchases our freedom from sin, so the blood of our veterans is a price paid to purchase our freedom from our enemies.

Most Christians only pay lip service to a theology of blood atonement or they ignore it altogether. Once theologians set to work at interpreting the Christian story, they offer it as a way to think about the spiritual life, not as a set of historical claims. The challenge of Remembrance Day is that it does relate to a set of historical claims and so it is easy to behave as if Remembrance Day doesn’t need interpreting; we can simply proceed like a fundamentalist Christian and behave as if the Day’s meaning is obvious on its face.

We tend to utter the same platitudes year over year without examining them. These platitudes involve words like sacrifice and freedom. But how exactly does the military secure freedom? One can trot out Hitler only so many times before someone notices that our troops have done a lot more than defend us from the one threat that actually gives some credibility to just war arguments. But how were they defending our freedom when they put my mother-in-law in an internment camp when she was six years old? How were they defending our freedom when they submitted me and thousands like me to illegal searches during the G20 summit in 2010? And how does any of this have a bearing on the historical trajectory of freedom among people of the First Nations?

In my view, a measure of freedom is the capacity to dissent. Let’s test how free I am. I wish to dissent from the conservative theology of Remembrance Day. I reject its literalism. I think it is incoherent to speak of fighting and freedom in the same breath. I affirm the statement of Thich Naht Hanh who says in the simplest terms: the path to peace is peace. There is no other. I also think it is incoherent to speak of freedom without speaking of responsibility.

If we are to spend this day remembering how we have come to enjoy our freedom, then we must do our remembering responsibly. If all we remember is horror, then we are picking scabs from wounds and making them fresh again; we are like trauma victims who wake in the night from flashbacks. There is a virtue in forgetting, or at least in a forgetting of a particular sort. It is a forgetting that is the beginning of healing and reconciliation.

If all we remember is horror, then we are like Mel Gibson who used the medium of film to resurrect the scourge of Christ and, in doing so, emptied the story of its meaning and left us with only our prejudices, including a gratuitous hatred of Jews. To find meaning, we have to take care in our interpretation of events, and if we are to do so with any measure of objectivity, then we must distance ourselves from them. Like a good theologian, we must ignore the literal trauma and give events a symbolic gloss:

The sacrifice which buys my freedom is not the literal death of soldiers on a front across an ocean two generations ago; it is the personal sacrifices I make each day as I exercise the responsibilities of citizenship. Some are formal, like voting and writing to my elected representatives. Some are less formal, like engaging in public protest or posting to this blog. And some things are amorphous. For example, I have recently moved into a building where perhaps a quarter of the women wear hijab or niqab. I view it as my responsibility to ensure their freedom to be as they are in a city where I belong to the dominant cultural group. I don’t really know how to do that, but I try by smiling in the elevator and asking them how their children are doing. Simple acts, but maybe the beginning of something more.

To borrow from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the theology of Remembrance Day often sounds like a theology of cheap grace: people made sacrifices for my freedom (as if my freedom is a durable cloak that I can hang in my closet and put on whenever I need it). But a considered theology of Remembrance Day preaches a costly grace: although I may have my freedom without doing anything to deserve it, I must forfeit all sense of entitlement and work daily to deserve it.

SOMETHING IS WRONG AT THE ROM

Yesterday I went to the Royal Ontario Museum’s Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit which the ROM has mounted with the cooperation of the Israel Antiquities Authority and which will continue until January 3rd, 2010. As an educational experience, it’s first-rate, top-drawer stuff, the perfect follow-up to last year’s Darwin exhibit. But then again, being the perverse person that I am, I don’t think I got out of the exhibit quite what the exhibitors intended. Let me explain by recounting my visit as a bit of a narrative that begins with me reading a book on a bench outside the ROM and ends a few hours later with me reading the same book on the subway ride home.

The book in question is an out-of-print collection of essays by Brian Fawcett which I picked up from a used book store a little further west from the ROM along Bloor Street. The book is Unusual Circumstances, Interesting Times and Other Impolite Interventions and I was reading a piece titled: “East Van Über Alles?” which purports to be a review of a poetry anthology from East Vancouver. It’s a continuation of Fawcett’s long-standing rant against contemporary poets as either effete or downright flatulent purveyors of cultural irrelevance. Poets, he says, have abdicated their social responsibility to reveal the lies which power tells to the world. To put it in quasi-religious terms (since I was about to see an exhibit on ancient scriptural materials): poets have surrendered their prophetic voice.

However, I wasn’t able to finish the article because my wife arrived and so we went inside, surrendered our tickets, and went downstairs to the exhibit hall. Things are tightly controlled there. People enter the exhibit at measured intervals and, like rats in a maze, they follow a twisting path that leads inevitably to the gift shop where they can purchase a full-colour soft-cover keepsake for $70. At each turn of the maze, there’s a bottleneck where people crane their necks and stand on tip-toe to read the neatly printed blurbs on the wall. Along the way are cases displaying oil lamps and ossuaries.

In historical terms, we patrons are poured into a funnel. First, we encounter a generalized summary of geopolitical realities on the east coast of the Mediterranean in the period pre-dating the most celebrated of all characters in our poetic output—Jesus of Nazareth. We learn about various archeological sites and the scarcity of written materials to establish the presence of Jews in these locations. Part of the reason is the climate—it’s too harsh for the survival of scrolls or parchments. Part of the reason, too, is the constant political upheaval which gripped the region (and persists today). The Assyrians conquered the Northern Kingdom (Israel) in 722 B.C.E. and scattered the ten tribes throughout its kingdom. Nebuchadnezzar led the Babylonians against the Southern Kingdom (Judah) in 597 B.C.E. and again in 586 B.C.E. When the Persian empire conquered Babylon in 539 B.C.E., Cyrus the Great allowed Jews to return from the Diaspora. In 332 B.C., Alexander the Great conquered the region and introduced a Hellenizing influence which persisted as a cultural phenomenon long after the Greeks had relinquished political control. Then came the Seleucids (a successor of Alexander’s empire) which prompted the Maccabean revolt and Jewish independence from 164-63 B.C.E. This takes us to the Roman empire which controlled the region for 400 years including the period when the Dead Sea Scrolls were written.

Moving further through the rat maze, we squeak our way past Jerusalem, where we know unequivocally that Jews were a significant presence. The exhibit reminds us that the Temple was destroyed twice, first in 586 B.C.E. when Nebuchadnezzar marched on Jerusalem, and again in 70 C.E. when the Romans got sick and tired of Jewish revolts and messianic caterwauling and thoroughly crushed the whole region. Of particular interest is an inscription which Herod placed outside the temple to satisfy his concern for purity. It was in Latin and Greek (and not in Hebrew) because it was directed at non-Jews, who were prohibited from entering the temple on pain of death. Imagine that! People in Israel wanting to kill foreigners. But that was 2000 years ago. Surely we’ve progressed some since then.

The maze takes us even closer to our destination, this time heading southeast from Jerusalem to a tiny community overlooking the Dead Sea—Qumran—now part of the occupied West Bank of Palestine. Here, the archeological questions pile up. Is this where the scrolls were written. Who lived here? Was it an exclusive sect of Essenes as one of the earliest investigators, Fr Roland de Vaux, theorized? Were these the people who stashed the scrolls in oversized clay jars and hid them in the caves surrounding Qumran? Why did they do this? Were they trying to protect these documents from advancing Roman armies?

Next, we encounter media presentations of experts who tell about the amazing discovery. In 1947, a Bedouin boy named Mohamed el-Dib threw a rock into a cave and heard the shatter of a clay jar. There’s a curious moment in one of the videos when the narrator says that de Vaux and his team worked in adverse conditions because of the “Bedouin problem.” Oops. Did I hear that correctly? The Bedouin problem?

A little further into the maze, things start to get dark. The scrolls are just ahead. To protect them, it’s necessary to keep lights low. As we approach, several panels describe the ensuing struggle to gain possession of the scrolls. At one point, some of the scrolls almost ended up as part of the permanent collection at McGill University in Montreal, but the Jordanian government cancelled the deal at the last minute, and so the scrolls continued to sit on the Jordanian side of Jerusalem—until 1967, that is—but wait! There’s no mention of this in the exhibit. As Robert Fisk has pointed out, the ROM quietly omits an important part of the story. As the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs web site illustrates, a few days after the Six-Day War, the Israeli Parliament changed the boundaries of Jerusalem. Despite the silence, we can infer that this is when the scrolls found a new owner.

Finally, we get to see the scrolls, a sampling of ancient scraps kept under glass in temperature- and humidity-controlled containers. The room is dark. It is—I have to confess—the least interesting part of the maze. I don’t read Hebrew, so I can’t pore over the scratchings, and even if I could, I doubt I’d be able to make any sense of it. We move to the other side of a wide screen, into a well-lit area where we are invited to ponder the fruits of these scrolls. Here, the ROM has assembled medieval samples of the Torah, Latin and Koine Bibles, and a couple Qur’ans for good measure. Then, of course, the obligatory passage through the gift shop.

But that’s not the end of it. We meander to the museum’s third floor where, just off from the Egyptian exhibit, there’s an installation by Joshua Neustein titled Margins: Contemporary art unraveling the Dead Sea Scrolls presented by the Institute for Contemporary Culture (a ROM thing) and the Koffler Centre of the Arts. There’s a chandelier partially embedded in a wall—like an archeological artifact embedded in the dirt? On another wall is charcoal back-and-forth and framed. There are plexiglass panels scattered across the floor. One plexiglass panel leans against the wall and writing inscribed on the panel continues onto the floor—an obvious (and by 2009, hackneyed) blurring of the limits of text. Then, of course, there’s the description of the work on another panel. Is it part of the installation? Or is it an “official” description? Given that the description also appears on the ROM website, I’m going to assume that the description was not intended to be part of the installation. The description on display differs slightly from the web site. It reads:

Positioning the themes of the Scrolls within a contemporary discussion about cultural traditions, Margins references prominent Jewish poet Edmond Jabès (Cairo, 1912 – Paris, 1991) and his critical works concerned with the nature of writing, silence, God, and the Book. Neustein recognizes in Jabès’s relationship to writing a parallel to his own artistic process. Living and creating between countries and languages, both artists express themselves from a position of displacement. Instead of a sense of belonging to a land, they both trace their roots to a deeper connection to the word and to a tradition of reading and questioning the Book. In the installation, Jabès’s mysterious meditations and the revealed knowledge of the historical texts converge with Neustein’s own visual vocabulary to convey the passion and impossibility of writing.

Okay, I get the identification with the Diaspora experience. This was amply attested in the basement rat maze we had just visited. The Assyrians scattered the ten northern tribes. Nebuchadnezzar forced the Jews into exile. And before either of these, there was the story of Moses leading the Israelites from Egypt in search of the Promised Land. Historically, mythically, spiritually, culturally, psychically, possession of land has never been part of the Jewish narrative. The remarkable cohesiveness of the Jewish identity comes from its embeddedness in the Book. I get all that—as much as your average WASP is ever likely to get it. What I don’t get is how any of this conveys “the passion and impossibility of writing.” What the hell does this mean? I’m going to give you a hint: I don’t think it means a damn thing. It’s just one more example of that effete and flatulant stuff that Fawcett has been complaining about. But more about that in a minute.

By this time, we were getting hungry, so we decided to skip across the road for a bite to eat. Stepping onto Bloor Street, we saw Palestinian flags waving from the opposite sidewalk and protesters were carrying signs with statements like: “Stollen Scrolls” and “Spoils of War.”

We continued to a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Yorkville, nothing fancy (I was in my usual shorts and running shoes). Further along Cumberland Avenue, we decided to pop into a Starbucks for a coffee. A man stepped in behind us with a handful of change. He was loud and jumpy. His clothes were dirty and he hadn’t shaved in a couple days. He plunked his change on the counter and asked for a ten dollar bill in exchange. The cashier couldn’t open the till unless someone else in line was paying cash, but we all held prepaid cards so the man stomped out frustrated. The encounter reminded me of Neustein’s “position of displacement.” I wonder if a Jew living in Israel post-1948, as Neustein did, is any better placed to speak about the “position of displacement” than anyone else in the world. Than, say, a homeless man who stumbles into Starbucks on an upscale street in Toronto. Does a meditation upon a state of affairs that ended more than sixty years ago qualify as “contemporary culture?” I mean, is Neustein fucking serious? Or is he just trapped in time, like a fossil? Maybe the ROM has accidentally mounted his installation in the wrong wing of the museum.

But back to Brian Fawcett. I opened his book on the subway and continued to read the review I had started while sitting on a bench outside the ROM. He was offering some hard words to those poets who identified with an arcane theoretical niche called “language centred writing” (LCW). To explain LCW, Fawcett quotes some of its proponents, including Bruce Andrews, who says that LCW “resembles a creation of a community and of a world-view by once-divided-but-now-fused Reader and Writer.” As Fawcett points out, these are weasel words. How can a movement be anything if all it ever claims to do is resemble something else. Or as he parodically asks: “Well, isn’t this just a super-complicated attempt to make poetry a public act without demanding that it also be socially interactive communication?” One might ask the same question of Neustein. As his installation sits tucked away in a dry institution, the only socially interactive communication worth mentioning is marching back and forth on the sidewalk three floors below. But Fawcett isn’t done:

The trouble is that LCW begins and ends, it seems to me, with a betrayal of the artist’s fundamental responsibility to communicate and to resist the alienation of meaning. It is a betrayal similar to that of the surrealists after the Great War. For the surrealists, the capitulation of responsibility was brought about by the technology-induced trauma of trench warfare, and the recognition that millions of human beings could be and were sacrificed to the hormonal and hegemonal dictates of a few senile generals, and to the greed of a corrupt political and banking system. LCW, in its turn, seems to be a capitulation brought about by the collapse of history and ideology in the face of Disney and the Global Village—a withdrawal into sentimental and free-floating labyrinths of the self from the recognition that our civilization and most of its subsystems are on a terminal trajectory.

If we substitute “Neustein” for LCW and “internet” for Global Village, then we’ve pretty much nailed what’s wrong with the Margins installation and the ROM’s bogus appendage erroneously named the Institute for Contemporary Culture. In light of events in December 08/January 09, one wonders if the “dictates of a few senile generals” have been systematically forcing artists into increasingly banal boxes. From his installation’s title, we know that Neustein is a liar. His is not an art of the margins. It isn’t art at all because it does nothing more than give voice to the power it serves, funded by sponsors with obvious interests, doing its part to legitimize a state of affairs that inflicts untold misery on millions of people.

Part Eight

Reading My Self

NON-ADVICE TO KIDS GOING TO UNIVERSITY

In addition to an Oscar-nominated film, “an education” is the title of life in my household this September. Both my kids are off to university and, to my delight and surprise, both are in liberal arts programs. This ought to feel like a milestone when we parents get all misty-eyed and say sentimental things that begin with “I remember when …” but to be truthful, we’ve been too busy to notice how we feel about these changes in our lives. There have been laptops to buy & load with software, finances to work out, a daughter to move into residence, a son to steer through a week of frosh parties. Only now, as classes begin, have we parents had time to reflect.

I’m worried. I haven’t given my kids any advice. I’m supposed to have accumulated all sorts of parental wisdom which I can now pass on to my children. The problem is: I can’t think of anything to say. It feels as if I was entering university myself only a couple years ago; I couldn’t possibly have lived long enough to acquire any wisdom. I look at my kids and they seem capable and, in many ways, self-sufficient. They’re smart and fun to be with. Despite a few tense moments growing up—evenings in the emergency ward, unexpected calls from teachers—it’s been a delight to watch them grow. I’m not sure they need my advice.

If there’s any wisdom worth passing along, it’s this: beware the wisdom of grown-ups.

By definition, people are grown-ups because they’ve forgotten important things about how to live. That’s one of J.M. Barrie‘s insights. We know we’re grown-ups when we forget how to fly.

In the case of young adults starting university, grown-ups are people who have forgotten what education is for, and these days there are a lot of grown-ups nattering on about education.

If we are to believe the grown-ups, education ought to be understood as an instrumentalist institution. It is a means to an end. The purpose of an education is to get a good job, one that pays well so graduates can buy nice stuff. Education policy is determined by broader economic policy. If policy-makers decide that what we really need is a strong manufacturing sector, then education funding gets skewed in favour technology and business.

We can see that happening in Ontario. Witness our newest university, UOIT or University of Ontario Institute of Technology, founded in 2002 as a deliberate effort to enhance Ontario’s competitive edge in the global marketplace, or rhetoric to that effect. Last year, my son and I went for a tour of the campus. I kept my mouth shut. After all, it was his decision to make and I didn’t want my bias to influence him. In fact, he might be surprised to learn now that I was appalled at what I saw. It isn’t a university. It bears that name and has degree-granting powers and will no doubt crank out highly skilled players in our new economy. But it isn’t a university. Not in the classical sense.

For years there has been a drift towards privatization and deregulation in higher education. This is true not only of Ontario, but of higher education in most western countries. It’s endemic of our times. But as universities become increasingly dependent upon large corporate donors, the potential for conflict of interest arises. Big Pharma has a choke hold on our medical schools. The same is true for Big Oil and our engineering faculties, financial institutions and our business schools, technology firms and our computer science departments. Whether or not large corporate interests affect curriculum and teaching methodology is beside the point. Conflict of interest is a matter of perception, not of fact. The mere presence of large corporate interests creates the perception that they influence curriculum.

Meanwhile cultural studies are pushed to the margins, deemed unproductive and therefore irrelevant. Music and literature are fluff. Visual arts are saved from complete denigration because they’re useful in the advertising business. And, ominously, the study of our history is losing ground as a legitimate area of inquiry. These are incidental pursuits for youth who have lost their way or need to rationalize a four-year pub crawl.

When I was a student, I made the mistake of choosing my course of study based on instrumental reasoning. I started in a liberal arts program, studying English literature and Latin. But it was the age of Reaganomics and everywhere I turned I could hear the grown-up voices telling me no one had any use for incidental pursuits like mine. By the time Gordon Gekko had arrived in the theatres, I was half way to a law degree and had adopted a more grown-up view of things. I find it strange that a generation later, Gordon Gekko has decided to bless my children with his wisdom in a sequel—Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. I hope more students today are alive to the story’s ironies than my peers were when I was in law school.

As I learned the hard way: you can’t follow someone else’s path. Some people are well-suited to the practice of law; for others, like me, it can be soul-deadening. It was hard for me to admit to myself years later that I had wasted so much time and energy on a course of study which, had I been honest with myself, I would have known at the outset was thoroughly unsuitable for me.

I don’t know why I persisted so long with something I hated so much. It’s not as if my parents cared one way or the other. Maybe I was trying to please them by trying to satisfy imagined expectations. But I doubt it. I think it was something subtler. I think I was sufficiently passive and uncritical that I allowed the rot of the times to seep into my bones. I didn’t even know it was there—this cultural rot that has flared up once again and threatens my children.

It’s the rot of an unimaginative pragmatism. It’s the mind-numbing talk of the free-trade ideologues. It’s the jittering dance of the global-economy marionettes.

So, to my kids, and to anyone else who cares to read this, I repeat: beware the wisdom of grown-ups. If anyone speaks to you in phrases that begin with “should” and “ought”, give them the finger. Do whatever it takes to feel alive. Because this is what education is for: in its broadest sense, an education is the condition you create for yourself to facilitate a sense of deep fulfillment.

V IS FOR VASECTOMY

Want to see a man cross his legs in a hurry? Just use the “v” word.

Not long ago, the topic of vasectomies came up in conversation at a family dinner. I mentioned the dreaded “v” word just to watch my brother’s response—the grimace and the sudden shift in the chair as he drew one leg over the other. My brother and I are, in some ways, vastly different people. And application of the “v” word acts as a kind of litmus test that quickly determines which sort each of us is.

Remember All In The Family? There was an episode from 1976 called “Gloria’s False Alarm” when Gloria decided it was time to get Mike to follow through with his promise. For the social activist hippie couple, getting a vasectomy was the politically correct thing to do. But to redneck Archie, a “vasexomy” was unnatural—an abomination. On my litmus test, I fall on the Mikey end of things, while my brother is more of an Archie.

My wife is a type I diabetic, has been since the age of 13. When we got married, the best information at the time was that a diabetic woman should finish having a family by the age of 30. (Care has improved and the upper limit has risen since then.) So, with the birth of our daughter just months shy of my wife’s 30th birthday, the question came up—what to do about contraception. Whatever our choice, it had to be effective; another pregnancy could seriously jeopardize the health of both mother and child. A vasectomy seemed the best choice. But the decision, however rational it might seem, nevertheless left me feeling a bit uneasy. I was burning my bridges, putting all my eggs in one – (maybe that’s a bad metaphor). Even more than saying “I do,” the decision to have a vasectomy felt like a sacramental act. You can tell I’m not a Roman Catholic, can’t you?

I overcame my reservations and made the appointment for day surgery at the local hospital. They told me the procedure would take only a few minutes, and I would have a full anaesthetic—a very minor procedure, indeed. I lay on a gurney in the hallway, in a long line of gurneys, like airplanes on a runway waiting for word from the tower. The anaesthetist stopped by my side, took up my chart and asked me a few questions. Then I mentioned that I was taking a medication and wondered if it was something he needed to know about. He wasn’t sure; he would have to consult with someone else. I lay there in my flimsy gown staring at the ceiling and feeling awkward. Finally, he returned and advised that, while he didn’t think it would be a problem, just to be on the safe side, they would do the procedure with a local anaesthetic.That meant I’d be awake through it all. “Fine,” I said. And they wheeled me in.

First, they pulled up the sheet and two nurses prepped me. All kinds of things went through my head. “What if they’re radical feminists?” I wondered. “What if they’re feeling vindictive?” There was a clock on the wall behind them, and as I considered the possibilities, I noticed that the second hand was slowing down. Behind my head was another pair of nurses with coffees and newspapers. They were looking up the lottery numbers and talking about their pool. I wondered if it was absolutely necessary to have them present as witnesses to the loss of my reproductive powers. I thought their voices sounded just a little too enthusiastic. They administered a needle and stood around chatting about one thing or another while they waited for the freezing to take. Then the surgeon stepped to the table and set to work.

“Hey, Doc,” I said. I couldn’t believe I was calling the doctor, Doc. “I thought I wasn’t supposed to feel anything.”

“Oh, you’ll feel something all right.”

Oh, I felt something all right. Something a lot like a mule kicking me in the groin. When I made the appointment, they had advised me that I should bring someone along to drive me home, since I wouldn’t be able to drive. And so, as I hobbled from the recovery room, I was greeted by the smiling face of my father–in–law. It seemed to me that his smile was just a little too … uh … smiley. Maybe the smile was heartfelt—acknowledgment that his son–in–law was a responsible young father and husband who was truly proving his commitment, but in between my grimaces, I was more inclined to view his smile as a show of sly satisfaction. “You’re not going to be doing that ever again to my daughter, now are you?”

I didn’t go out for a run as soon as I got home. And it was at least a week before I rode a bicycle, and even then, not with much comfort. Once I was able to walk upright again, we went out to dinner with several couple friends of ours. During the meal, I accidentally let slip the “v” word when they asked what I had been up to lately. “Oh, so you had a vasectomy? I had that done last year.” “Me too. Hurt like hell for a couple days.” All the others at the table had already done the deed, even the Roman Catholic, who reasoned that one big contraceptive sin was far preferable to a long string of little ones. So I found myself in good company. And they accused me—me of all people—of being lax for not having it done sooner. It’s amazing how the tables turn in the game of political correctness.

Now if only we could preach the gospel of vasectomy to all the sorry kids who keep appearing on the Maury Povitch show with all their trash talk and DNA paternity tests. Now here’s an idea for a socially useful episode: “Father of five children by five different mothers gets vasectomy in front of studio audience!”

IN PRAISE OF MASTURBATION

Or how choking the bishop might just save the world.

When I was a kid, there was a statistic floating around that Toronto was the world’s second largest Italian-speaking city. I don’t know if the statistic was true, but given the composition of my neighbourhood, it seemed probable. One result was that there was (and still is) a lot of Italian TV programming which I would sometimes watch. I had a theory that, between friends teaching me how to swear in Italian and watching Italian TV, I could learn another language. I remember a scene in a movie starring Sophia Loren as a harried single Catholic mom (widower of course) who was trying to feed breakfast to her many children. She was scolding her oldest boy for masturbating too much and the dialogue went like this:

Mother: You masturbate too much. You need to stop.

Son: Why?

Mother: It’s not good for you; you might go blind.

Son: Who says?

Mother: Our priest.

Son: Who? The blind one?

There are all sorts of religious prohibitions against masturbation. In Catholic circles, myths about blindness almost count as a teaching of the magisterium.

Section 2337 of the Roman Catholic Catechism speaks to the virtue of chastity. “Chastity means the successful integration of sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being.” Fair enough, but section 2396 says: “Among the sins gravely contrary to chastity are masturbation, fornication, pornography, and homosexual practices.” This, of course, raises the obvious question: how on earth can men who profess to be celibate have sufficient experience to offer any useful advice about matters of sexuality?

In more severe Protestant fundamentalist evangelical sects, the Genesis story of Onan dominates thought about masturbation. While, technically, Onan committed coitus interruptus, the fact that God killed him for spilling his seed on the ground should be a lesson for us all. If you believe this story, then an interesting logic takes hold:

1. God punishes us for our sins.

2. But God is just.

3. Justice includes the idea of proportionality. The severity of the punishment is proportional to the severity of the sin.

4. Masturbation receives the worst possible punishment.

5. Ergo masturbation must be the worst possible sin.

The result of this logic is that you can commit genocide and get off more lightly than someone who, uh, gets off.

The masturbation taboo is not unique to the Judeo-Christian heritage. Writing from the Buddhist perspective in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Yukio Mishima tells of an acolyte who both masturbates and has nocturnal emissions. The young man experiences these as matters of shame and refers to them, much like the Old Testament writers, as “pollutions” and “self-abuse.”

While we tend to associate the masturbation taboo with Old Testament myths, Jesus offers an indirect prohibition which may, in fact, be more influential. In the Sermon on the Mount, he tells followers that sin involves not only what you do, but also what you think: “You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Note that women are off the hook, except, presumably, lesbians.)

Given that masturbation is almost always coupled with fantasy, the potential for adulterous “sin” is enormous. “So what do you think about?” asks my wife. “I don’t know,” I lie. “Me, right?” “Sure,” I lie. The trap is set and I get caught in it every time. There is no way to answer this line of questioning without being accused of something wrong. You’re either an “adulterer” or a “liar.” Which illustrates why most people have no use for traditional religion—they take it as implying that normal healthy people ought to feel bad about being normal and healthy.

Twentieth century sexology offers some hard evidence on the matter, especially around the issue of prevalence. Virtually every able-bodied male of every cultural group and ethnicity masturbates. (Scholars wonder what Jesus was doing from the age of twelve to thirty, but the answer should be obvious.) And while masturbation amongst women is not universal, it’s still the rule rather than the exception.

The fact is that even before masturbation is possible, young children have a fascination with their own bodies and find it pleasurable to touch their genitalia. Virtually all of us can offer anecdotal evidence to support this. I still smile when I recall how, in my own household, there came the fateful “masturbation call” from school. We tried to keep a straight face while the child care worker laid out the gory details of the incident. I concluded that masturbation was a misnomer. Our four-year-old had simply whipped it out for a bit of exploration, and isn’t that what education is all about? Getting to know your world—even the world between your legs? The interview revealed nothing new about our son; what it revealed with absolute clarity was the extent of the child care worker’s anxiety.

At the same time as we have exposed the prevalence of masturbation, recent discoveries of cellular biology render ludicrous the notions of wasting seed or degrading its efficacy. Men have these little spermatozoa factories that go on manufacturing the tiny guys throughout most of adulthood. And a spermatozoan is a spermatozoan is a spermatozoan. Doesn’t matter whether it’s been hanging around inside a pair of testicles for fifty years or fifty seconds, it has all the genetic material it needs to get the job done.

The only thing that has remained unchanged in the lore of masturbation is the “release factor.” In ancient times there were prohibitions against sex and masturbation for soldiers on the eve of battle. This was viewed as a way of enhancing aggression. The practice persists in pro sports before important games.

Notwithstanding new knowledge and its greater availability, discussions of masturbation still remain taboo. In pop culture, there’s only a handful of references. There’s Led Zeppelin’s “Lemon Song” and a reference to mutual masturbation in “In The Car” by the Barenaked Ladies. There’s a Seinfeld episode, a shower scene in American Beauty, and Limp Bizkit is named after a somewhat gross masturbation game. But not much else comes to mind.

Given the relative scarcity of masturbation in pop culture, it should come as no surprise that masturbation conversation is virtually absent from religious dialogue. Have you ever heard a sermon devoted to masturbation? Have you ever had a discussion group? What about your communicants or catechumens? They’re right at that age when sexual awareness is exploding in all kinds of awkward ways. What could be more timely? “Yes, it’s normal. No, you won’t wear it out. Yes, it’s OK to enjoy your body. No, you won’t go blind.” One exception I’ve encountered in the religious context is a course called “Good Sex” taught by Marilyn Legge at Emmanuel College. But don’t get all excited. The “Good” refers to sexual ethics, not technique.

There are two religious justifications for prohibiting masturbation that I’m willing to entertain (though unwilling to practice). The first is found, for example, within Buddhism and the Catholic practice of the celibate priesthood. This is the notion that there is a spiritual reward inherent in self-control. While I admire people who undertake this discipline with an integrity of motive, I have difficulty with the way it is often presented. Religious celibacy is a vocation, not a requirement. Most people feel no calling to religious celibacy. So it shouldn’t be held up to typical religious masturbators like me as an ideal against which we have fallen short. That’s like the coach at a track and field tryout who sets the bar at a hundred meters and tells the athletes they can’t join the team unless they make the jump. You can trivialize virtue by making a task too easy; but you can also trivialize it by making it too hard.

The second justification has to do with sanctity of life, and bears an affinity to Catholic arguments around birth control and abortion. It reflects a concern that if people are too callous about masturbation and the life-giving nature of semen, this will desensitize them in their reverence for life. The most obvious response is that only a man could think up something like this and forget to exempt women. Nothing is lost if a woman masturbates, and the world is probably richer for the pleasure she experiences. As for men, see my comment above about the tiny spermatozoa factories that dangle between our legs. Again, nothing is lost and the world is probably richer for the pleasure we experience.

The “reverence for life” justification should be turned on its head. The best way we can express our reverence for life is through the experience of pleasure and the celebration of our bodies. Joy is a virtue—not the furtive secretive pleasure of a sensation we’ve been duped into feeling guilty about, but the full-on delicious unabashed joy that comes from savouring the experience of embodiment.

I also believe it’s possible to move by analogy to a global experience of joy in embodiment. The Romantic poets knew this intuitively when they expressed their rapture at beauty in the natural world. But we’ve lost that feeling. The attitude that finds in embodiment “pollution” or “self-abuse” has, in its orientation to the world at large—to Gaia—taken literally the notion of “pollution” and “self-abuse.” Gaia has offered up stolen pleasures and we’ve thrown back land-fill dump sites, and toxic aquifers, and an atmosphere overloaded with carbon dioxide. If we cultivated that full-on delicious unabashed joy, we might find ourselves celebrating our global embodiment in ways that are healthier.

To put it bluntly: masturbate; it’s good for you; and it’s good for the world.

I leave you with a video clip I caught of a mayoralty candidate who ran for office here in Toronto several years ago. I think his name is Kevin Clarke. He ran on the masturbation platform. He wanted Canada to be a masturbation nation. I voted for him. He was right. If there was more masturbation, crime rates would drop, drivers would be more courteous, and people would smile at one another on elevators. Overall, I think Mr. Clarke had an excellent civic plan. Maybe next election.

CHATTING WITH TORSE, EFFET DE SOLEIL

Thirteen is a horrible age to be a boy. Your testicles are developed enough to make demands on you. But the rest of you is sufficiently immature that you can’t do much about it. Thirteen year old girls are already young women—with airs and wiles and the beginnings of sexual instincts. They have no interest in thirteen year old testicles. So you’re trapped in that nether age of sexual indeterminacy with no release except the release you invent for yourself.

When I was thirteen, most of my friends relied on stolen copies of Playboy and Hustler, a wide-ranging capacity for fantasy, and a firm grip. In these, they found their release. Never having been a thirteen year old in the internet age, I have no idea what adolescent boys rely on nowadays. Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s available in abundance. God bless the Internets.

Unlike most of my friends, my only access to Playboy and Hustler was whatever I could steal, which wasn’t much. To my knowledge, my dad never subscribed, read, used, whacked off to such magazines. I could be wrong. My dad could have been far more clever in his discretion than other dads. I’ve never asked my dad about this. Maybe I should, just to get everything out in the open. I doubt I will, but you never know. One day, there might be a deathbed confession: Son, Son, come closer. I have something for you. Take this key. There’s a trunk in the attic. Open it. Everything inside is yours. Use it well.

With limited access to the usual “gentlemen’s” magazines, I had to be resourceful. Also, I was a bit of nerd. It would be unfair of anyone to expect me to follow the usual course when answering the call of Onan. Coincidentally, thirteen was the age when I began to take seriously my studies at the Royal Conservatory of Music. I decided I was going to take all the courses for my A.R.C.T. before I finished high school. Like I said: I was a bit of a nerd. So in the summer after I turned thirteen, I enrolled in the first of three required music history courses. It was a survey course of Western music that sometimes took detours for a look at political history, philosophy, literature … and art. The text was full of pictures. One of those pictures was a black and white photo of a painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, a nude torso of a young woman, Torse, effet de soleil. I didn’t care much about the details of the painting. All that mattered to me was the boobs.

Despite its crass beginnings, I developed what you might call a relationship with Torse, effet de soleil. Apart from the boobs, I noticed that the woman seemed to shimmer in the sunlight. This, I learned, was a hallmark of impressionism and characteristic of early (and later) Renoir. There was a blurring of boundaries, no clear distinction between the young woman’s body and the space it inhabited. Everything was light and airy. I also noted how odd it was that a woman should be standing nude in a park at midday. Does this sort of thing happen often? I wondered. Will it happen to me? As I approached adulthood, I looked forward to the many times when I would stumble upon pleasant-looking women standing naked in parks at midday. Sadly, adulthood hasn’t lived up to its promise.

Sometimes, the young woman and I would chat. She’d smile and wait patiently amongst the leaves while I finished my business. I’d ask if she minded being naked in the open like that. No, it was sunny out and as long as the sunlight kissed her skin, she didn’t mind the occasional breeze. But don’t you feel vulnerable, standing like that for everyone to see? After all, you never know who might show up in a park. She told me my concern was sweet, but the fact is: security is such an illusory thing. She said this was something that I would learn as I grew up. I squared my shoulders and tried to keep my voice from breaking as I told her that I was already grown up, preternaturally wise, ahead of my time. Her laughter went well with the shimmering leaves and the flecks of light dancing on her shoulders. Do you ever get bored, just standing in a painting like that? She shook her head and told me how, every day, she had lots of interesting conversations. I felt hurt, but knew it was naïve to suppose that I was the only one.

Last month, I visited the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. I hadn’t thought about what I might see there. A friend had recommended I go; it was more civilized than the Louvre where bus tours swarm through the galleries and people crowd around paintings as if they were the bones of saints. He said I might enjoy the impressionist gallery. Downstairs, I saw a familiar portrait of Hector Berlioz; I had first seen a photo of the famous portrait in my music history text at the Conservatory. I wonder … the impressionist gallery was upstairs. My heart began to race as I rode up the escalator.

I strolled from room to room, trying my best to look nonchalant. I passed paintings by Degas, ballerinas stretching. I noted Whistler’s famous portrait. Monet’s shimmering facades of Notre Dame. Water lilies. Reflections. I couldn’t give a shit for any of it. All I wanted—

There she was.

— Hello. She called to me from across the room.

I stammered a greeting but choked on my words.

— I never thought I’d see you again. What’s it been. Nearly forty years?

— Thirty-seven.

— Still. That’s a long time.

— You haven’t aged a bit.

— You have. You’re chunkier. And you’ve lost most of your hair.

— Ah well. And I laughed my false laugh.

— Do you still whack off?

— I’m married now.

— So?

— I’m mean, yes, sometimes. I’m in a serious relationship, you know.

— Of course. And yet here you are. Talking to a painting.

— And here you are. Hanging from a nail.

— Touché.

— So how long has it been, you know, since Renoir painted you into that park?

— Oh mon dieu. Let’s see. A hundred and thirty-eight years.

— Really! That long?

Clumps of people drifted through the gallery. A couple times, a teenaged boy stopped to ogle my friend’s boobs. Our conversation petered out until all that remained was silence. The encounter reminded me of a high school reunion. You know the feeling. You’ve lost touch with your best friend, but they’ve promised to go to the reunion. You can’t wait to meet them. There’s so much catching up to do. The anticipation makes you feel like you might burst. But when the evening arrives, and you come face to face with your old friend, a quick exchange is all either of you has for the other. There’s nothing to say. The intervening years have risen like a wall between you and no amount of excitement or nostalgia will tear down the wall.

That’s how it felt with Torse, effet de soleil. With the passage of so many years, we had grown apart. I was married and had kids. She, a former prostitute or mistress to Renoir, had found respectability in a gallery overlooking the Seine. I nodded my good-bye and left her boobs shimmering in Renoir’s glorious illusion of sunlight. Although our encounter was bittersweet, one thought gave me solace. If I were to canvas all my friends from our days as randy thirteen year old boys, there isn’t one of them, all these years later, who could say: Oh yes, I was in a Paris gallery and had a lovely visit with Miss July. Centerfolds don’t end up on those kind of walls.

JOCK STRAPS AND OLD MAIDS

In grade seven, I started going to a new school, a junior high school which sat immediately north of the hydro field. I lived immediately south of the hydro field and could see the school from my back yard if I climbed on top of our tree house. Every day, I did the five minute walk underneath the high-tension transmission lines that crackled when it rained and otherwise hummed at a frequency I’ve come to regard as the mantra of our industrial life (ohm). Along the sidewalk was a fence of wooden posts the thickness of a man’s thigh—or Hulk Hogan’s arm. The posts were as high as a man’s waist, and threaded between the posts was a single steel cable. During the cross-country running unit in our gym class, we would run alongside the fence and do scissor jumps over the cable. I was terrified of doing this. I’d seen too many of my classmates catch an ankle on the cable and flip face-first into the grass, or land astride the cable and topple over in agony.

Gym class was an alienating experience for me. We had to buy a uniform and keep it in an ugly purple duffel bag. That included a jock strap—a piece of clothing shrouded in mystery. Apparently my body was going to change soon. That’s what it said in a book my mom bought at the drug store. I loved to read and my mom took advantage of that fact to avoid “the talk.”  For me, “the talk” went like this: “Here’s something for you to read, son.”  I read the book, looked at my new jock strap, and felt reassured that one day my genitalia might be big enough to fill this mysterious piece of clothing. As it was, we did our running in the cold and I was so shrivelled up, the jock strap would have seemed pointless no matter how big my genitals. I did my scissor jumps over the cable and prayed I would make it without suffering permanent damage.

I used to walk home under the hydro wires with a friend, another David, another geek. We were like-minded in our view of gym class. In elementary school, we had often stayed late to play chess. Now, in junior high, we stayed late with two other friends and played bridge. That’s not to say we didn’t entertain fantasies of one day becoming track and field stars or celebrated Tour de France champions. In fact, we both enjoyed healthy imaginations. But mostly, we exercised our imaginations with math puzzles, word play, and tall tales.

One afternoon, as we walked home from a game of bridge, we found one of the fence posts uprooted, hovering just above the ground, suspended by the cable strung from the neighbouring posts. It was obvious a car or truck had jumped the curb and collided with the post, snapping it where the wood had rotted below the ground. Now, it hung like a decayed tooth held in place by a mouthful of braces. This was an opportunity. Minds at play. Fantasy life at full throttle. We stuck the post upright in its hole and acted out scenarios where one or the other of us would break the post and knock it over. We were famous wrestlers. We were giants. We were aliens. We were oblivious to the neighbours walking their dogs and approaching on the other side of the street.

I recognized the man because I often saw him out walking his dog, but I didn’t know where he lived. The woman lived across the road from us and a few houses down. She had a dog named Lady that looked like a husky, but smaller. I had always been wary of these two. They wore sour expressions and never spoke to kids. Except this afternoon. They watched two pre-teens break a fence post on public property. Vandals. Hooligans. Wanton destroyers of stuff they had paid for with their hard-earned tax dollars.

The man lit into us with a fury. We were a couple of useless punks up to no good. He was going to call the police on us. He was this. He was that. It didn’t help that we started to laugh at him. It was absurd to suppose that two skinny twelve-year-olds had snapped a solid post with their bare hands. We did the only thing twelve-year-olds can do when faced with the absurd logic of the adult world—we ran away.

I recall a professor once observing that children have an innate sense of justice. I don’t think that captures it. Children have an innate sense of injustice. Children are as stymied as you and me when asked to explain what justice means. But flip the question on its head and ask a child to identify an instance of injustice and a child will slay you with her honesty.

We all remember moments of injustice from our childhood. The moment I’ve shared is benign, but it illustrates the elements of a kind of injustice. Call it procedural injustice if you like: the jaw-dropping pause at absurd assumptions, the feeling of impotence, the sense that no one is listening, the inability to give actions a context.

We all remember moments from our childhood when adults in authority—parents, teachers, neighbours walking their dogs—demanded that we children explain ourselves. We felt their impatience, the pressure of time drawing a close circle around their willingness to listen. We stammered. We coughed up fragments. Our incoherence struck adult ears with the ring of guilt.

Now, as a grown-up, I sometimes forget that the adult demand, “Explain yourself”, requires of children a skill they haven’t yet mastered—the skill of sustained narrative. Look at the story which introduces this entry. Written by an adult, it takes 700 words to establish the context of a broken fence post. At twelve, I was only beginning to learn this skill; I was intimidated and tongue-tied at a grown-up’s harangue and so, instead of telling my story, I ran away laughing.

Sometimes we use story to give context and meaning to our lives. Story roots itself in granular experience. In that respect, it is antithetical to globalism. There is no such thing as a global story. The very idea is incoherent. As story reveals us in our granular experience, it becomes a tool for justice. We explain ourselves to power. We document our context, and once documented, it cannot be taken from us. If story is a tool for justice, then globalism cannot help but aspire to unjust things; for globalism denies the validity of the granular experience we record in story.

I’m suspicious of people who speak of education in instrumentalist terms, people who denigrate the arts and call, instead, for students to acquire those skills which will contribute to the country’s gross domestic product and make it competitive in the global economy. I don’t trust people who can’t see the point of poetry or literature or music or ars gratia artis in a curriculum. I’m wary of their motives. There is no better way to surreptitiously secure social injustices than to strip a people of their ability to tell their stories. Without this ability, they will stand before power—like a twelve-year-old before a blustering grown-up—and stammer incoherently for their rights. Conversely, storytelling is one of the most effective acts of resistance a person can commit. It is inherently anti-global and it gracefully draws power into the circle of empathy it describes. This explains why there is no better way to quell subtle resistance than to strike our primary tools of empathy from the school curriculum.

There are times when we find ourselves in a position of power in relation to others—parents in relation to children, bus drivers in relation to riders, bosses in relation to employees, teachers in relation to students, the healthy in relation to the sick, the knowledgeable in relation to the ignorant. I think it’s fair to say that most people who find themselves in a position of power aspire to exercise their authority with fairness. One of the most powerful tools in the fair exercise of authority is deep listening. When Mark Antony says: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” he demonstrates how the act of listening confers power. He demands it and his inferiors unquestioningly grant it. The corollary is that those with power can empower those who have none through the simple act of listening.

This would be a convenient place to end my entry—a fine message: those without power can assert themselves with storytelling; those with power can exercise it responsibly with deep listening—except I haven’t told the whole story. I’ve told you about me and my friend, the two twelve-year-olds pretending to break a fence post. And I’ve told you about the man who misread the scene and accused us of vandalism. But I haven’t told you about the woman who was walking with him, the neighbour who lived across the street.

Here, I lose the thread because, to be honest, I don’t know the story; I can’t even remember the woman’s name. I offer that as a sad confession. In fact, at the age of twelve, I didn’t have the maturity to know there even was a story. Here’s what I did know: our neighbour was a nurse. She lived with another nurse. Neighbours who spoke of them used words like “spinsters” and “old maids,” suggesting they had moved in together for companionship because neither had found a suitable man to marry. Her “old maid” “spinster” companion died and left her alone in the house they had shared. That probably accounted for the sour expression. How could she grieve? Each day, when she left the house, I expect she clenched her jaws and twisted her face into a steely mask. I think she must have been the loneliest person I ever met.

The woman isn’t such a puzzle to me. There have been nod-and-wink neighbours since the dawn of (un)civilization. Really, the man is the enigma here. What did he think he was doing on those daily dog walks with the grieving “spinster” nurse? Did he fancy himself a gentleman caller? Given his propensity to misread situations, this is a possibility.

But this happened more than thirty-five years ago. Their story belongs to the dead now, which means we, the living, are free to tell it any way we please. It is our right, since the dead hold such power over us.

ACTUALLY, MADLY, DEEPLY

While wandering through the purgatory that is suburbia, I noticed a sign for a contracting company with the name: Actual Plumbing Ltd. I neither endorse nor disapprove of the contractor, and I assume they don’t mind free advertising on my blog. I think it’s an interesting name. What makes plumbing actual plumbing? Is there such a thing as non-actual plumbing? The kind of plumbing that uses fake pipes and invisible toilets? Or maybe the word is used in the same sense as it was used by sixties pop-psychologists when they talked about self-actualization. A thing is actual because it has emerged into an authentic state of being. (The pragmatist in me tends to think the owner chose the name because it’s close to the beginning of the alphabet.)

Dragon Fire

The sign piqued a memory from more than thirty years ago. The theme park, Canada’s Wonderland, had just opened and they were desperate for student workers to do grunt work for minimum wage. Me? I was just desperate. That’s the only reason I can think for working there. At that time, the park was owned by the Taft Broadcasting Corporation and run by a bunch of American cowboys who were gonna show us simple Canucks how to run a real theme park. An actual theme park. I was a cast member. The customers were Guests. We were putting on a show. Creating an illusion. An actual illusion! Smiling. Always smiling. A happy world where Guests could escape from their miserable lives for a day, or something to that effect. That was the pitch from the cowboys.

Early in my career as a happy cast member, I got stuck taking tickets at the Dragon Fire, an upside down double looping roller coaster. On the afternoon of the evening when Bette Midler was playing the Kingswood Music Theatre, a pompous English twit came to the front of the line with his entourage and demanded a ride. I swear it was Christopher Hitchens, but that’s probably my memory playing tricks on me. I told him he needed a ticket. He told me he didn’t; they’d already let him into the park for the Bette Midler concert; that was all he needed. I told him he needed to buy separate tickets for the rides.

“Look,” he said, “this is how it works. It’s called marketing. You let people into the park two hours before the show. You let them ride a couple rides. You give them a taste. You pique their interest. They come back for more.”

“Actually …” I wanted to point out that the marketing had worked—only not the way he wanted it to work. He wanted it to work so that he wouldn’t have to pay money for tickets, whereas the park was a business and therefore designed to take as much of his money as it could. But the Christopher Hitchens look-alike cut me off.

“What did you say?”

“I said: ‘Actually …’”

“Oh do stop! That horrid word! There is no such word as ‘actually’. Where do they teach you such things? Are you a student?”

“Yes.”

“What are you studying?”

“English.”

“Oh, go on.”

“But I haven’t actually started the program yet.”

“There it is again! Please. My ears!”

“Actually?”

“Doesn’t exist.”

“I thought it was an adverb.”

“If you insist on using it, people will take you for an ignoramus.”

And so it went until my supervisor ended things because we were holding up the line. My supervisor sent the man and his entourage back down to the ticket booth, but we never actually saw them again.

With over thirty years of reflection under my belt, I’ve concluded that there really is a word “actually”. However, it’s so abused and overworked, that, like most adverbs, it is essentially meaningless. Just like essentially. Really and truly.

That summer I didn’t learn much about adverbs. I learned a lot about people. Guests. That endless stream of inconsiderate assholes that insisted they were right no matter what.

Sometimes, the only way to change a person’s point of view is with shock tactics …

The Hotrock Raceway

I spent most of the summer working the rides in Bedrock of Hanna-Barbara fame. Fred and Barney lived there. I liked working with little kids. It was the parents who gave me nightmares. I’d look at a kid and think: Please, please, please don’t grow up to be a sociopath like your mommy.

The Hotrock Raceway was a track for Flintstone-style cars. The ride had a height restriction because the cars were small and it was hard to slip long legs in under the hood. Most of the time, when you told a kid they were too tall, it wasn’t a problem. They were getting too old for this stuff anyways and there were better rides in the park. When you told them they could ride the grown-up cars, that made them happy and they went away.

But there was one kid who went hysterical on me. He was a skinny boy about five feet tall. It turns out he was only seven or eight. When his dad came up the exit to complain, I understood why this seven or eight year old kid was five feet tall. His father was humongous. He stared down at me and lit into me about how all his life he had been too tall for everything and now it was happening all over again with his boy and he was damned if he’d let people treat his boy this way just because of his height.

I tried to explain that the height restriction was for safety reasons. The cars were small and if his son rode with his knees tucked beside his ears and if his car jerked to a sudden stop, it could injure him.

The man wasn’t interested in my reasons and insisted that I let his son ride in one of the cars.

I told him I couldn’t do that. Then I had a brilliant idea: I asked if he wanted to speak to my supervisor.

He liked that idea. He told me to go get my supervisor and we’d get this sorted out.

My supervisor was extremely short which is my understated way of saying she was a dwarf. She was all of about three foot six inches tall and, unlike the boy who wasn’t allowed to ride, she could fit quite neatly into a car on the Hotrock Raceway. I brought her to the ride and squared her off against the irate father. She tilted her head as far back as it would go and asked: “Now what seems to be the problem?”

The man threw up his hands and walked away.

Not all Guest concerns came with such a neat resolution. There was one that still leaves me scratching my head.

Flintstone Flyboys

The Flintstone Flyboys were these stupid pterodactyl eggs. You’d load kids into each of the eggs and they would spin around a centre pole. Each of the eggs came with a metal bar that went waist-high in front of the kids. If they pulled the bar into their guts, it activated a hydraulic thingy that raised the egg into the air. If they let the bar go, the egg would come back down. Whenever I loaded an egg, I’d buckle up the kids, put their hands on the bar, and tell them to pull it towards them once the ride started. When all the eggs were loaded, I’d go to the operator’s booth, give my spiel, and push the start button. The ride had only one button. It was a dead man’s switch. Push the button and the eggs would spin on a ninety-second timer. Let it go before the ninety seconds were done and the eggs would stop spinning.

It was a completely forgettable ride (for me) except on one occasion. I loaded all the eggs with little screaming kids. There were three little black girls who sat in one egg. As per my training, I strapped them in, handed them the metal bar, and told them to pull it into their guts if they wanted to make the egg go up in the air. I went back to my booth, gave my spiel, and pushed the only button on the control panel. I looked at the clouds. I looked at my fingernails. I looked at the eggs to make sure nobody was falling out or spitting on Guests. Ninety seconds went by. The ride stopped. I helped all the kids get out of their eggs. And that was that.

But before I could let the next batch of kids onto the ride, a black man approached me. When he spoke, I knew he wasn’t Afro-American. I couldn’t place the accent. Maybe from Nigeria? I couldn’t be sure. He said: “In my country, if a white man did what you just did, he’d be shot.”

I was stunned. I had no idea how I could have offended him. I asked: “What have I done?”

“You know exactly what you’ve done.” And he walked away.

I didn’t have time to think. There were more kids in line waiting their turn. The only thing that occurred to me was that if the man had shot me, it would be a pretty pointless murder. When break time came, I skipped my routine. In my spare time that summer, I had resolved to read everything Franz Kafka had ever written. I think I was on The Penal Colony. But instead of taking out my book, I chewed on a sandwich and thought about what had happened. I closed my eyes and revisited the scene, from loading the kids to pushing the button to unloading the kids to the ominous statement from the man (whom I presumed was their father).

Then it hit me. I knew what I’d done, or at least what he thought I’d done. The girls never pulled on the metal bar. They were too busy in fits of laughter. So while all the other pterodactyl eggs went up and down, their egg went round and round. It didn’t seem to matter to them. But it sure as shit mattered to their father. I think he thought I controlled the hydraulic thingy on each egg, that I had deliberately kept their hydraulic thingy from activating. I let all the white kids go up and down and left the black kids to go round and round. He didn’t realize that I had only one button to push—a dead man’s switch.

A few other things occurred to me, too:

1) The man had no idea how onerous (i.e. technically impossible) it would have been for me to discriminate against his children in precisely the way he imagined.

2) The man assumed the worst of me probably because others like me had given him their worst before.

3) In Canada, we (or at least we who are liberal Caucasians) tend to assume that discrimination is passive. It’s the result of thoughtlessness or a failure of imagination. We suppose it has something to do with the unintended consequences of otherwise benevolent systems. We don’t imagine that people are actively racist. (I don’t know if this is a true characterization of how we think, but it was my impression at the time.)

4) In my encounter with this man, we both experienced the opposite of communication.

I fantasized about a return to the scene: I would show the man the control panel and the single button I had pushed to start the ride. Then he would understand and I would understand and all would be right between us.

Actually

Earlier, I called Guests assholes. I take that back. Some Guests behaved like assholes, but I can think of only one reason for their behaviour. They came to the theme park from their actual world. The actual world held things for them that were unpleasant or challenging or dangerous—bad grammar, a world that doesn’t accommodate tall people, racial hatred—and they wanted to escape, if only for a few hours. They paid for the park and its cast members to perform an illusion—to hide the actual. But sometimes the actual made unwelcome incursions into the illusion. It was at precisely those moments that Guests acted out.

There may indeed be no such word as “actually”, but the actual is a certainty. Ironic that it was drawn to the foreground with greatest clarity when I was trudging around in a stupid outfit pretending to live in the stone ages with Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble.

OFF THE PATH WITH MICHAEL

God was simple to exorcise.

Charity and pathos are not so easy.

— ryan kamSTra (from iNTO tHE dROwNED wORL_D)

I’m meeting a friend for lunch. She used to work for the city as an employability specialist. The way I understand it, her job was to help homeless people develop the skills they’d need to get back to work. My impression is that her job was overwhelming. A cup of resources. An ocean of need. And no sense that her efforts made a bit of difference. Now, she works in a glass tower for a wealth management company. I wait for her in the foyer of the building. There’s a gentle snowfall outside—not enough to accumulate on the sidewalks, but enough to remind me that it’s mid-February with weeks to go before the winter weather breaks. For lunch, we go downstairs and into The Path.

For readers who have never been to Toronto, this city has the world’s largest underground pedestrian network. If you’re new to the city and you walk through the business district, you may note the modest rush of people along the sidewalks, unaware that beneath your feet, thousands of people are scurrying like ants through the downtown core. Deep below the streets are hundreds and hundreds of shops and restaurants, kiosks, banks and coffee shops. It makes sense. Toronto is the financial heart of Canada’s economy and it can’t afford to let a little thing like a snowstorm keep it from beating on.

We go to one of a seemingly endless succession of food courts and find a buffet where we can fill a Styrofoam tray with fresh greens and pay by weight. The place is buzzing with conversation—hundreds of people rushing to down their food, have a chat, read a few pages from a novel, check their blackberries, post to Facebook on their iPhones. At first, we don’t think we’ll get a seat, but I notice a free two feet of space between a professional-looking head-shaven woman and two youngish men who look like aspiring executives. We squeeze in on either side of the table and eat and chat and do our part to sustain the hive.

This is my city. I was born here. I grew up here. I even spent a couple years working downtown, trying to fit into this polished frenetic professional environment. But I didn’t last. The truth is: I don’t belong here. When I walk through The Path and see all the stony-faced people coming towards me, it overwhelms me and I have to get out. If I don’t get out, I’m afraid I’ll freeze. I won’t be able to take the next step and so I’ll be swept away by a torrent of people.

After lunch, I return with my friend to the lobby of her building. It’s not her building of course. I have no idea whose building it is. Then the improbable happens. I recognize another friend, a father from the trampoline club where our children have trained together. It turns out he works for the same wealth management company. My two friends have never met, so I introduce them.

They disappear up into their respective offices, leaving me alone in the building’s lobby, wondering where to go from here. I look at the snow falling outside, then turn to the stairs and descend into The Path. Royal Bank Building. Scotia Plaza. Commerce Court. I stand in a stairwell to get away from the buzzing and then I phone my wife—part of our daily “check-in” routine. She works on the 50th floor of the Toronto Dominion Bank Tower—another node on The Path.

I decide I need to make a break for it, so I wrap my scarf around my neck, zip up my coat, and walk upstairs and onto King Street. Across the road is Commerce Court, four buildings, 109 stories of offices. To my right is First Canadian Place, 72 stories of offices. And kitty-corner from me is the Toronto Dominion Centre, five buildings, more than 200 stories of offices. I haven’t got a hat, and with no hair on my head, the snow flakes tingle when they land on my scalp.

When I reach the curb by First Canadian Place, I hear a voice call out: “Spare some change? I’m tryna scrape together five bucks for a meal.”

It’s a man, late fifties, maybe early sixties, grey stubble, weathered face. He’s wearing something over his ears—not sure what it’s called—a cross between a headband and ear muffs. When he speaks, he pulls a cigarette from his mouth and I can see yellowed uneven teeth.

I dig into my pocket and pull out a loonie.

“Thanks, man.”

I want to walk away, get as far as I can from him. Charity is one thing; having to talk to someone is quite another. But the stoplight is against me, so I have nowhere to go.

The man takes another drag on his cigarette and after he exhales: “You know, I’m tryna get enough for a meal. Just five bucks. You wouldn’t happen to …”

I stare across the road at the Scotia Plaza, an amalgam of old and new, 68 floors of offices. I dig again into my pocket and pull out a toonie.

“Thanks, man. That’ll really help.”

I think of another encounter like this that happened twenty years ago when I was an articling student, an aspiring lawyer. I had been standing on the opposite corner of the same intersection. As I exited Commerce Court, a guy my age (I was in my twenties then) had approached me and asked for two dollars so he could have a bite to eat. I’ll never forget his face—the dull blue eyes, the yellow skin, the bits of spittle on his chin, the emaciated frame. Is it really true? I wonder. Will they always be with us?

“Do you ride the subway?” he asks.

“What?”

“The subway. You ride it?”

“Yeah. Yeah, sure.”

“Cuz I got a token. You know, like if you maybe give me five bucks, I could sell it to you. Then you could ride the subway and I could get something to eat.”

I pull out a five dollar bill and he presses a token into my palm. It’s worth three dollars. He throws the cigarette on the ground and he looks at me. He has blue eyes, just like the guy I met twenty years ago. I wonder what happened to that guy.

“I really should quit these things.”

“Probably helps keep you warm,” I say.

“Yeah. Exactly.”

“You know,” he says, “there’s this woman I think of all the time.”  I notice that the man has a warm smile. “She used to stand over there.”  He points further west along King Street. “The kind of woman who likes a man, if you know what I mean. I can’t get her out of my head. She’s always with me—here—in my head. But I haven’t seen her for real, like, not since my birthday and that was in November. I’m fifty-three you know. But she’s older, maybe fifty-nine, a working woman, if you know what I mean, but nice. She’d talk to me. But I haven’t talked to her in, like, three months. I’m afraid. I’m afraid to talk to her. I’m afraid she’ll kill me.”

“You seem nice enough. I don’t think she’ll kill you.”

“Naw. I guess you’re right. It’s just I have schizophrenia. I get these things in my head and I can’t get them out. I see this woman all the time. She’s there in my head, every day, every hour.”

I watch the cars rush past. I watch the lights change to green but I don’t cross the road. I feel the snow falling on my bare head.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“I’m Michael.”

“Michael, I’m Dave.”

“Nice to meet you, Dave.”

“And it’s nice to talk to you, Michael.”

“You have a good day, Dave.”

“You take care of yourself, Michael.”

I cross the street, but my head is cold and wet, so I make for the stairs that will take me back down to The Path.

MENTAL ILLNESS STEREOTYPES: AMY WINEHOUSE AND ANDERS BEHRING BREIVIK

Mad Pride Week finished more than a week ago. I had intended to write a piece on it but couldn’t find a hook. Until yesterday, that is, when two very different stories trended all over the social media universe. One story from the UK: soul singer, Amy Winehouse, had died at the age of 27. The other from Norway: a man named Anders Behring Breivik had detonated a bomb in Oslo, killing 7, then went to an island where he killed more than 80 teenagers. I note a common theme in media (and reader) responses to these events. Both events are being analysed with the usual toolbox of mental health clichés. The people at the centre of these stories have been reduced to mental health caricatures. The commentators reveal widely-held prejudices that were just as current in the 18th century as they are today. And both stories illustrate why Mad Pride is necessary.

What is Mad Pride?

Mad Pride borrows from Gay Pride. It takes queer theory and applies it to mental health. So, for example, rather than trying to “cure” mental illness (which may be ludicrous in any event, at least in the case of chronic major mental health issues), it seeks to assert mental illness as an identity. One way to do this is to take back those words that have typically been used to stigmatize and denigrate people who wrestle daily with major mental health issues. Just as Gay Pride seizes ownership of words like faggot, fairy, and queer, Mad Pride seizes ownership of words like nuts, crazy, and cuckoo. In addition, Pride movements try to dispel myths—the pedophilia myth in the case of homosexuality, the violence myth in the case of major mental illness. I have written previously about the application of queer theory to mental health. You can learn more about Mad Pride here and here.

Amy Winehouse

Although news reports have not yet disclosed a cause of death, for my purposes, it doesn’t really matter. Expressions of regret for a talent destroyed by addiction are legitimate. What concerns me here is the way people respond given the fact that her death is presumed to be drug and alcohol related. People denigrate her talent. People call her a loser. People say it was her own damn fault; she was a weak person. Others, like James Rhodes writing for The Telegraph, suggest it was the price she paid for her talent, as if she had entered into a Faustian pact. Almost from the day she released her first album in 2003, the public has shown a lurid fascination with her pharmacological struggles, her increasingly bizarre stage behaviour, her on-again off-again relationship with rehab. She wasn’t a musician with fans; she was a cottage industry for voyeurs. People went to her concerts for the same reason they go to NASCAR races—they secretly hoped to see a wreck.

What is missing from the responses to the woman’s addictions is empathy. If we identified with Amy Winehouse, that would require us to drop the moralizing tone that prompts us to say it was her own damn fault. If we identified with Amy Winehouse, we might even have to drop the “disease” language and acknowledge that the challenges of addiction place it more in the category of a syndrome than a disease. It has multiple contributors. It is complex. One-word epithets like “loser” and “tragic” are expressions of denial. They deny complexity, and in particular, the complicated social arrangements that made us all complicit in Amy Winehouse’s death. We bought her albums. We devoured the stories of her latest onstage meltdown. We paid to watch. In other words, we helped to finance the machinery that converted her personal misery into a marketable commodity.

Anders Behring Breivik

When the story broke of a bombing in Oslo, the media assumed it was a terrorist attack, probably perpetrated by Muslim extremists (do the media know any other kind?), probably members of al Qaeda. In an op-ed for Aljazeera, Ibrahim Hewitt notes how much this reveals about Western prejudices. When the media later learned that the perpetrator was a blond-haired, blue-eyed Norwegian, he was no longer a terrorist, but a “deranged lone gunman.”  The media neatly side-stepped the fact that Breivik was strongly influenced by fundamentalist Christian extremists and a politics of the far right. The “deranged lone gunman” label allows right-wing ideologues to brush aside the embarrassing fact that Breivik’s target—a left-wing youth camp—suggests an affiliation with a politicized Christian right.

Hewitt’s observation is sound, but it deserves another turn of the screw. Since the Western media could no longer scapegoat Islam, they resorted to the mentally ill. Breivik is deranged, insane, crazy, nuts. He must be. That’s the only inference that can be drawn from the commission of such heinous violence. We see a subtle example of this (il)logic in a BBC article. After reporting that Breivik remained “calm and balanced throughout a 10-hour night of interrogation”, the article quotes his lawyer: “I think he’s realized what he’s done, and he views himself as sane.”  Implicit in the statement is that no one else agrees with his self-assessment. Breivik is either a Muslim extremist (which the facts don’t support) or he’s insane. The third option is unthinkable: Breivik is a calculating and rational man who has demonstrated what it means to draw right-wing Christian views to their logical conclusion. Since this is unthinkable, the media has chosen instead to perpetuate the myth of a correlation between mental illness and violence. As a result, those of us who already suffer, suffer doubly for media prejudices.

Evasion of Responsibility

What these two stories hold in common is the application in the media of prejudices, stereotypes, clichés, myths, and half-truths about mental health issues in order to facilitate a collective evasion of responsibility.

In the case of Amy Winehouse, we get to pretend that she suffered from a moral weakness and that the collective demands we imposed on her had nothing to do with her death.

In the case of Breivik, we get to pretend that he was a “deranged lone gunman” and that a global swing to the hard right, with its rising militancy and rejection of difference, had nothing to do with his violence.

As a proud madman, I wrest the word “deranged” from the media. I am deranged. I am peace-loving, too. And, except when I snore, I’m a delight to be with. Through its articles, the media provides examples of how sane people think. I would rather be deranged.

Update

Since I drafted this post, the quotes I provided in reference to Breivik’s calm demeanor and self-perception as sane have been deleted from the BBC article. See News Sniffer to track the changes. What are we to infer from the deletion of references to Breivik’s sanity?

DEATH BY PEPPER SPRAY

On September 26, 1995, Zdravko Pukec gained the distinction of being the first person on Canadian soil to be asphyxiated by pepper spray. The debate continues regarding the effectiveness of pepper spray as an alternative restraining measure, and periodically the fatalities are paraded in the media. Those opposed remember the dead, and those who support the deployment of pepper spray point to all the people who have been saved because law enforcement officers didn’t have to shoot them. I want to sidestep the debate and treat Mr. Pukec’s death as a failure of Ontario’s mental health regime. Pukec had wits enough to survive the horrors of a civil war and ethnic cleansing in his native Croatia, yet he didn’t have the wherewithal to survive a psychiatric facility in Whitby, Ontario. Pukec would have been better off living as a contemporary of Charles Dickens when mental illness was criminalized; then, he would only have been beaten from time to time. Now, as we approach the 11th anniversary of his death, it is important to remember the brutal circumstances of his death, to ask why no psychiatric health care providers nor law enforcement officers were called to account, and to hope that things have improved.

Why should I care? Two reasons: 1) Zdravko Pukec was a client, and I had the pleasure of interviewing him just as he was slipping into that soundless chasm that yawns between the criminal justice and mental health systems; and 2) in an irony of the sort that seems to characterize my life, I found myself an in–patient in a psychiatric facility on the day that Pukec was killed. When I read of his death, I was powerless to respond.

In the year before Zdravko’s death, I had been practising law in north Toronto. He had an aunt living not far from my office. She had been living and working in Toronto for 28 years and she had sponsored her nephew so that he could flee his homeland without having to go through the more trying procedure of seeking refugee status. She contacted me and advised that Zdravko had been struck by a car while crossing a street in Kitchener, about an hour west of Toronto. The province had implemented a new no-fault auto insurance scheme, and Zdravko’s aunt was concerned that he had not received adequate compensation. I asked why Zdravko hadn’t called me himself. She explained that the boy’s English wasn’t very good, and besides, there was this other matter … Since his recovery from the accident, Zdravko had gotten into some trouble and so couldn’t speak on a telephone or come to my office. And then, bit by bit, the whole story came out.

Some time after the accident, Zdravko had been walking through a mall and started following a woman who was carrying a large purse over her shoulder. He grabbed the purse and ran, but mall security staff cornered him. He was desperate. He believed that the purse contained a tiny computer (Mac minis hadn’t been invented yet) and was sending signals to his brain, trying to get him to do things he didn’t want to do. He had snatched the purse so that he could destroy the computer and silence the messages that were entering his brain. At his first court appearance, it was apparent to the presiding judge that things were askew in Zdravko’s thinking, and so the judge ordered a thirty day remand to determine fitness to stand trial. Zdravko was shipped off to METFORS (Metropolitan Toronto Forensic Service) which stood on the grounds of the former Queen Street Mental Health Centre in Toronto (now CAMH), and so began his descent into a hell that few of us can ever imagine. I quizzed the aunt: “These things don’t just happen all of a sudden,” I said. “There must have been symptoms before this.” The aunt said that, yes, sometimes he had conversations with the fridge, but it hadn’t struck her as a serious concern because he was otherwise well–behaved, a real nice boy.

I couldn’t very well investigate his accident claim without an interview, so I drove downtown with the aunt and conducted my initial consultation. I was stunned by what I encountered. The holding facility was on the fourth floor of a five–story concrete cube. (The building has since been demolished.) Outside the elevator, there was nowhere to go but to a single reception window. I presented myself to a guard sitting on the other side. I offered my business card and driver’s license with photo ID. After looking at my driver’s license, then looking at me, he pushed a button and I could hear a lock release. Zdravko’s aunt and I passed through the door and sat in a reception area. “That was easy,” I thought. But that was only the beginning. The guard sent a message to the ward and we waited while Zdravko was taken to an interview room. After nearly twenty minutes, two armed guards appeared through another door. They would escort us upstairs. When I passed through this next set of doors, I stopped and gawked. I was standing on the fourth floor, but could look to the roof of the fifth floor. Most of the building was empty except for metal caging. Our escorts led us through a locked door in the caging and up a set of metal steps to a catwalk. We were now on the fifth floor and gazing down into this cavernous space. At the far end of the catwalk was a metal door and beyond that another metal door, and then a tiny ward that housed twenty or so “patients.” With so many secured doors, and armed guards and precautions, I was prepared for the worst. Once the final doors closed behind us, the guards disappeared and we were left to fend for ourselves. “Fend” is the wrong word. A couple men, one in jeans and the other in pajamas, approached, they smiled and said hello and asked how we were. I felt like I’d passed into another dimension, or had fallen like Dr. Who into an alternate universe. Everybody smiled pleasantly, happily, psychotropically. Why, I wondered, was the facility so secure when all the in-patients were so docile? With such bliss, who would ever muster enough gumption to escape?

Eventually, a nurse led us to a narrow room, bare except for a couple of simple tables and some chairs. Zdravko was waiting for us, perched on one of the tables with his back wedged into the corner. He was young, twenty-four, with dirty blond hair that had grown long. There was a sparse growth on his face. He smiled and said hello and seemed to be in good humour. Other reports say that he didn’t speak English. That isn’t entirely true. He spoke passable English, but his accent was thick. With help from his aunt, we were able to converse well enough and stumbled only at one point. I was trying to get Zdravko to set up the accident for me, tell me what he’d been doing beforehand, tell me where he’d been standing, what direction the car had been coming from. There had been a stoplight a little further down the road. Why didn’t he walk to the corner and cross at the lights? Then I asked my question: why did you cross the road? (Like the setup for a bad joke.) He answered: “Because of ze viches.” “Ze viches?” What the heck are viches, I wondered. I turned to his aunt for help. She looked at me like I was a moron. “You know. Ze viches. Zey fly on brooms.” Then I understood. Witches had called him from the other side of the road. They had tricked him and he stepped into the path of an oncoming car. It was while he was recovering from his injuries that he developed the notion that there were wires implanted in his brain and controlling his actions.

After the thirty day remand had expired, the attending psychiatrist completed a form 14 under the old Mental Health Act (committal papers); it was clear that, in his present condition, Zdravko could not be released into the general population. He seemed like a nice enough person, but he was unpredictable. From METFORS, they shipped Zdravko to a psychiatric ward in London, Ontario. A few months passed and then I got another call from his aunt. Zdravko had gone blind. She was convinced the psychiatrists had given him the wrong meds. All these powerful psychotropics had made him blind. She asked me to investigate. I phoned his psychiatrist in London and asked what was going on, and he advised that Zdravko had retinitis pigmentosis. Both my cousins have retinitis pigmentosis, so I realized immediately that this had nothing to do with mental health issues or meds. For Zdravko, blindness was inevitable and unrelated to his other health issues. Zdravko’s aunt would have none of it. I hate phone calls like this. I had to tell her about the diagnosis and what it meant, but she was not prepared to listen to me. I was a lawyer, not a doctor. I would have to sue them for making her Zdravko blind. She was inconsolable, so I let her yell and scream until she had nothing left to say.

There was little more I could do for Zdravko Pukec. In the circumstances, the accident compensation had been reasonable. As for his mental health, well, that was unfortunate. And the retinitis pigmentosis? A damn shame. But, really, what had that to do with me? Or me with it? So I let the matter pass.

That winter, things did not go well for me. Work was stressful. Lingering concerns had reasserted themselves. Increasingly, I found it difficult to get moving in the morning. I couldn’t concentrate. Sometimes I was filled with rage, and then the rage would dissipate into a profound sadness. Yet everything I felt struck me as utterly disconnected from the circumstances of my life. Every week, things got worse. I stayed indoors. I wanted nothing to do with other people, not even with my own children. There is a point in clinical depression when you find yourself weeping for no reason at all, when you are overcome by immeasurable grief and all for nothing. But there is a point beyond this. Your emotional life becomes so profoundly thwarted that you feel nothing at all. There is simply nothing. At that point, I was confronted with a choice: either go to a hospital, or let a psychiatrist sign a form 14 and force me to go to a hospital. I could not believe this was happening to me. I was the person who had it all together. I was the person everybody else relied on. I was the person who always gave strength to everyone else. How could I be the needy one?

I spent most of the fall of ’95 in a psychiatric ward, gradually crawling out of the hole I had fallen into. It was between admissions, in the first week of October, that I read the article, really only a paragraph: Zdravko Pukec had been killed. It was on about page 27 in the newspaper. Ignominious. Trivial. A footnote in someone else’s debate.

From what I understand, Zdravko had sensed the onset of a psychotic episode and so had advised the staff at the Whitby facility. (What does a psychotic episode look like to a blind man? Did Zdravko not wonder at the irony of it all? That in blindness, he could have his vision, but only the vision of a certain sort?) The staff managed to effect partial restraint, whatever that means, then called police for assistance. A coroner’s inquest cited as his cause of death: “cardiac arrest associated with acute psychosis, physical restraint, positional asphyxia, exhaustion and stress due to pepper spray.” But I have a theory. I think the real cause of death was an equal measure of ignorance and stupidity—ignorance in assuming that Zdravko’s mental illness somehow gave permission to treat him cavalierly, and stupidity in failing to ask if this was an appropriate situation for the application of pepper spray.

Here is how I think death occurred. When the police officers arrived on the scene, the Whitby staff had already managed to restrain some, but not all, of Zdravko’s limbs. He did not pose a danger to anyone else (because at least one limb was already restrained); this negated the need for pepper spray. The staff told the police officers they needed to subdue the patient. The key word is “subdue.” I conjecture that the police officers assumed that pepper spray functions the same way RAID functions when you spray a wasp. If the wasp is still twitching, you keep spraying until it stops twitching. But pepper spray is not toxic. There is no active ingredient, as there is in RAID, which will “subdue” the person being sprayed. Pepper spray doesn’t “subdue” anything. Pepper spray induces a reflex: hands go to the eyes and so can’t be used to hurt anybody. But if the behaviour you are trying to control is thrashing, there is only one way to end the thrashing, at least only one way with pepper spray, and that is asphyxiation. It wasn’t pepper spray which killed Zdravko, but it’s persistent application. This is only a theory and I have no way to confirm it, but I think it’s a reasonable theory.

Although I didn’t talk about it with anybody, I took Zdravko’s death quite personally. The police had killed one of us, and for no good reason that I could discern, except the obvious one—he was different, he was strange, he needed to be controlled. In the year following Zdravko’s death, I had three more hospital admissions, each for more than a month, and then I decided that I had had enough. I knew I would never need to return to a psychiatric ward. One day I caught myself wandering from room to room, sitting down and chatting with the other people on the ward, listening to their stories, reaching beyond myself and acknowledging that my reality—which only months before had shrunk to a point of nothing—was only as large as the due I gave to those around me, especially to those who seemed different or strange, especially to those who seemed most out of control.

IT GETS BETTER

It gets better. At least that’s what Dan Savage says, and he’s persuaded millions of people to repeat it often enough that it sounds true. He—and they—and I—want teens and twenty-somethings who are struggling with issues of sexuality and identity to bear up under the burden of loneliness and hatred; we want them to look beyond the immediate fear of bullying to a time in the not-too-distant future when they will feel free enough to be themselves in the open. It gets better.

The campaign has its detractors, of course, people who rightly point out that:

• it implies that young people should remain passive, waiting for a better future rather than working to make things better right now;

• it doesn’t actually get better for some people;

• the celebrity spots are instances of flagrant self-promotion masquerading as concern for a fashionable cause;

• when the Catholic League can dictate terms to the Smithsonian, we are reminded that “It gets better” cannot be regarded as a one-off campaign, but as part of an ongoing struggle because there’s a strong supply of Bill Donohue’s in this world.

And then there’s my complaint:

They, or some of them, or some circling close to them (whoever “them” is) seem to think that LGBTQ flies are the only ones getting their wings torn out. I’m concerned that maybe, just maybe, this campaign lulls us into a complacency about, or distracts us from, or blinds us to the many other groups who find themselves on the receiving end of routine discrimination / bullying / misunderstanding / ostracism.

What do we tell the mentally ill?

While I could name any number of groups here, there is only one I know much about, a group that is as diverse in its concerns as LGBTQ’s, with interests that often overlap. I speak of those who struggle with mental health issues.

In thinking about mental health issues, I have found it helpful to draw analogies to queer ideas. For all its hardships, one of the upsides of being, for example, gay is that, in and of itself, being gay doesn’t impair your ability to think, whereas being, for example, schizophrenic pretty much guarantees it. One of the interesting consequences of that fact is that most people who have published papers about queer ideas identify within the LGBTQ spectrum whereas those who have published papers about psychiatric ideas tend to identify outside the DSM IV. And one of the interesting consequences of that difference is that queer theorists think, among other things, about how to be someone and how to be that someone for a lifetime, whereas psychiatrists spend far more time thinking about how to cure someone. For those of us who think psychiatrists spend too much time barking up the wrong tree, it becomes useful to cannibalize the thinking of queer theorists who, because they tend to be more organized than us, have managed to develop a more coherent body of thought.

Then the “It gets better” campaign comes along and reminds me that it is, after all, only an analogy. For one thing, the relationship between sexuality and mental health is porous. Some people get depressed as a response to the intractable situation their sexuality seems to have placed them in. On the other side, some people experience their sexuality as a symptom of illness. Things get mixed up. For another thing, there are ways in which the analogy between sexuality and mental health doesn’t hold. For example, despite all the talk of closets, LGBTQ’s are far more out than the mentally ill. Where’s the bipolar guy doing his version of the “It’s get better” video for people with mental health issues? How about the schizophrenic begging for change on the street corner? Or what about the forty-year-old man who never leaves his room because he’s been hamstrung by an acute social anxiety disorder? How about a message for them too?

What are we afraid of?

Fifteen years ago, when I was first admitted to a psychiatric ward, the minister at the church I no longer attend suggested to my parents that it would have been easier if I had been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. I think he was wrong, especially given that I’m still here while friends and family who had HIV/AIDS are no longer. Now I hear that minister’s comment as an expression of fear. He was working things through while his mouth was moving. I hear it as a normal response. We all carry fears with us of one sort or another. That’s part of what it means to be human. In fact, we wouldn’t survive without some measure of fear. We’d be like those people who can’t feel pain and, as a result, lead precarious lives. Contrary to what motivational speakers tell us, we cope, not by overcoming our fears, but by interpreting them correctly, giving them their due and no more.

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed “homosexuality” as a category of psychiatric disorder from its DSM. Last month, the APA announced that in its forthcoming DSM-5, there will no longer be such a thing as “Narcissistic Personality Disorder.”  I’m not the only one who finds it amusing that the APA’s announcement should coincide with Time’s selection of Mark Zuckerberg as its person of the year—the man who has turned narcissism into a social requirement. But if homosexuality and narcissistic personality disorder can be expunged, why not other psychiatric categories? Depressives are just melancholy; manics are inspired; schizophrenics are blessed. Etc. It reminds us that psychiatry isn’t really an objective branch of science so much as a taxonomic exercise or an attempt to account for misery. It has far more in common with religion than science. As such, its terms are provisional and are infinitely revisable. For most of us, they are a matter of convenience. It is, after all, extraordinarily inconvenient to walk to work through the financial district and to pass a man like Michael with his hand outstretched and asking for help or, worse, looking for conversation. It is far more convenient to slap him with a label and shove him out of the way.

How are the mentally ill bullied?

I’ve already mentioned two ways the analogy breaks down: 1) those with chronic mental illness are disorganized and so they rarely speak with their own voice, and 2) as a consequence they are often far more closeted, which is probably another way of talking about isolation and loneliness. But there is a third way in which the analogy breaks down. We see it in the nature of the bullying.

First, there’s the question of timing. In matters of sexuality, the great threshold is puberty. In matters of major mental illness, onset is typically later. You may remember kids from high school who were morose or odd or different, but it’s unlikely that you remember anyone who heard voices that you couldn’t hear too or was convinced he had superpowers or wished she could spend all day in gym because she had so much energy she thought she might explode. Bullying in junior high and high school is more an LGBTQ experience than a mental illness experience.

Because the mentally ill typically don’t encounter bullying until after high school, the quality of that bullying tends to be subtler. Sure, there are still crude examples. The kids who roll a homeless man for fun. The suit who sees a panhandler and yells: “Get a job!”  These are both examples of bullying. But some of the most insidious bullying finds itself embedded in institutions and systems. It’s hard to take the “It gets better” message to a bully that isn’t even human. How do you respond to a system that sees no place in it for your difference? That accords no legitimacy to you as you are but insists on changing you? That, as a matter of course, first engages you by administering mind- and personality-altering drugs? But, you say, there is space in our world for the mentally ill. There really is. They are our poets. They are our creatives. To which I answer: Right; and all gays know feng shui; and all lesbians are connoisseurs of craft breweries.

So how does it get better?

It doesn’t get better, not because things don’t improve, but because “better” is the wrong fucking adverb. Things get more. Things get different. Things get large. Things get complicated. Things get wise.

“It gets better” isn’t a description of how things will be; it’s an aspiration; it’s a wish. But as the genie says: be careful what you wish for. Will the world really be a better place if you and I get to sit around with our hot toddies and congratulate ourselves on how well we’ve done with our gayness or our craziness? Did we get to this place so we could pat ourselves on the back? In a world that has now embraced narcissism as a universal virtue, that may be be tempting. However, I suggest that we aspired to this place for a purpose—not to assert our particular identities in their narrow enclaves (LGBTQ, crazy, Filipino, dolphin) but to join hands across difference.

I feel like a person who sits with his tea while outside the storm rages. Rich Western states use their might to secure the world’s resources and devour the planet in the process. Those are the bullies I’d rather have a go at. In the meantime, having secured myself by asserting my identity, if the best I can do with my time is to go on asserting my identity and nothing more, am I any different than a tea-drinker in a storm?

I want things to get better, not so I can have everything that the bullies have. That would only make me like them. It gets better so that I can help them be better too. Calling for things to get better is not an exclusive proposition; it’s a yearning to fill the whole world with love. It gets better because you and I are committed to making it better for everyone, even (and maybe most especially) for the bullies.

EVERYONE'S A SYNAESTHETE

1. My wife sings in a community chorus. As a dutiful husband, I went to her concert last Saturday and listened. Typical of me, my mind wandered. I like to say I have a nimble mind, but when I’m being honest, I confess that “nimble” is a euphemism for “easily distracted”. While I listened to the chorus, I found myself distracted by two women sitting ahead of me and to the left. Their heads bobbed up and down but not in time to the music. I wondered if they were playing a game. I leaned forward and strained to see what they were doing. They were resting sketch pads on their knees and drawing their impressions of the concert. At intermission, I spoke to them. The one woman is a professional artist visiting from Turkey. The other, a competent amateur, is her host while she visits. I said it was a very synesthetic thing they were doing, listening to a concert and interpreting it with sketches. I wonder if many artists draw what they hear?

2. After the concert, we went to a birthday party for a friend, a mezzo-soprano named Maria, and during a lull, she and I talked about the artists I had seen. It seems to me that singing opera is also a synesthetic experience. There is the libretto (the text of the story) and the musical score and there is the drama which the singers bring to life. Maria gave my reflection another turn of the screw by suggesting operas in which parts portray artists acting within operas. There is Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler (Matthias the Painter). Tosca’s lover, Mario Cavaradossi, is a painter. And Berlioz based an opera on the memoirs of the Florentine sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini.

3. I drank too much wine, then went home and fell asleep. The next day, around noon, I noticed that my hand was missing. When I looked away, it was there, and when I stared at it directly, it disappeared. This could mean only one thing: I was getting a classic migraine. Soon, I saw squiggling lights in front of my eyes. Typically, this stage of the migraine lasts only five or ten minutes. The curious thing about the squiggling lines is that they respond to sound. If someone shouts or slams a door, the lights fly up in sudden peaks before they resume their squiggling patterns.

Synesthesia happens when input from one sense stimulates another sense. The classic example, often cited in the literature, is composer Olivier Messiaen, who saw colours when he heard music. I experience an associated phenomenon, known officially as ordinal linguistic personification—the perception of gender and personality in ordinal numbers and letters. Sometimes there’s more than that. Sometimes powerful images stimulate sounds—the opposite of what Messiaen reported. One of the most striking instances of this happened to me while driving through Alberta last fall. We came upon a decapitated buck. It looked like a headless buck was rising out of the asphalt. As we approached, a roar mounted in my head. By the time we reached it, the roar was a wall of white noise as loud as Niagara Falls.

I have a hypothesis. I think all people are synesthetes. At the very least, all people have synesthetic experiences. I think most people don’t notice because they desensitize themselves to this experience. This seems like a natural response. Too much sensory input would be overwhelming. Nevertheless, I believe most of our modes of expression have synesthetic roots.

Here are some illustrations, beginning close to home, then moving outward to modes of expression that are less familiar (to me).

My Blog. Even though my blog concerns itself mostly with the power of words, I adhere to a simple rule: each post must include something of visual interest. If it’s a book review, then an image of the cover. If it’s a story, then a photo of something thematically related to the story. I’m not unique in this. Most online content strives to integrate different media and appeal to more than one sense.

Poetry. Perhaps the oldest form of human expression, poetry attends not only to the content of the words, but also to their musicality, their rhythm and timbre. What’s more, we agree (perhaps by some tacit contract) that one of the measures of a poem’s merit is the extent to which its words stimulate images in our minds. Hence the word imagination. By convention, we have decided that good poetry is imaginative poetry.

Spectacle. We love spectacle. We love to assault our senses with sights and sounds. We get it in our living rooms with Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, Glee, Smash. We get it in big tents when we go to Cirque du Soleil, and on big screens when we watch Titanic in Imax 3D. Add to it the smell of popcorn and the tack of our shoes on the floor and our experience is complete. We go to Glastonbury and Burning Man and, if we’re rich, we try to get a shot into outer space.

Aldous Huxley suggested the reason we do these things is that they give us an intimation of a transcendent reality. I’m more inclined to think they awaken in us the memory of synesthetic experience which we knew in infancy but have suppressed because survival requires it.

I don’t know if my speculations are true. Sometimes it’s nice to retreat to a dark and silent place, and then, to re-enter the world as if I’m being born to light and sound.

The sun rises like a bomb and roars overhead until, come nightfall, it whispers again.

Part Nine

About Revisited

For the whole of my writing life, I’ve scribbled under the shadow of a supposition which, though untested, I believe with the fervour of a religious conviction: my writing will never be any good until I have nothing to say. Maybe it’s less a religious conviction than a koan. It’s a paradox I can use for contemplation. When you see the Buddha, kill him; when you feel tempted to write about something, trash it and start over until you’ve written something totally pointless. There’s nothing I can dredge up that definitively proves the supposition. There’s a vague intuition, some questionable experience, nothing solid. Maybe the most solid support comes from the obverse supposition:

As nouspique reaches its 10th anniversary, I find myself taking stock of things—not a deep, existential, meaning-of-life stock-taking, but something more modest: what the hell have I been writing here anyways? Whenever my answer to this question includes the word “about”—nouspique is about this or about that or about some other shit—the posts that give credence to the suggestion that it’s about this or about that or about some other shit are invariably the worst-written posts of the bunch. Whenever I have something to say, the writing sucks.

This is most apparent in the earliest posts. When I started blogging, I was a student at an institution of higher learning. Academic discipline infected my words. There had to be a thesis. Evidence had to be marshalled in support of the thesis. There had to be coherence, cohesion, directionality, a logical progression. It had to be expressed impersonally, passive voice, with the illusion of an objective point of view. I wasn’t making nouspique about anything so much as creating space for its self-evident aboutness to present.

My struggle with aboutness wasn’t all my fault. Early in the history of blogging, media organizations—maybe feeling the first whiffs of their own mortality—tried to force a convention: blogging is a form of journalism which means that bloggers should be held to the same ethical demands as their confrères in the physical world. They need to be truthful; they need to do fact-checking; they need to be objective and unbiased; and, goddamit, they need to work on their spelling. To put it in general terms: the media would have us believe that blogging is a modernist project. The writing sucks accordingly.

I’m inspired by the sitcom, Seinfeld, famous for being a show about nothing. The show had no content to speak of. It was a show in the process of being a show. I wouldn’t go so far as to accuse Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David of following a McLuhanesque “the medium is the message” schtick. There is no message. Not even in the medium. If there is a point at all, maybe it’s to provide a vehicle for advertising. Think of all the internet gurus offering help/training/conferences/seminars/webinars on how to monetize your blog. It doesn’t need to be about anything; all it needs to be about is to be about being a blog.

Looked at objectively, journalistically, impartially, whateverly, one might say that the blog trivializes public discourse (and it probably does), but the nothingness which is the blog’s essence produces gaps into which people, like me, people who aspire to write well, can surreptitiously throw their words.

For hundreds of years the human species has conducted itself like a mob of brownshirts who rush against aesthetic sensibilities, shackling them, forcing them onto the stand to defend themselves against the charge of having nothing useful to say. Work. Utility. Money. When it comes to expressing value, we have an impoverished vocabulary. The beautiful and the pointless stammer before the court then shuffle off, heads bowed. We compound their guilt with talk of suffering. How can we condone acts of pointless beauty, useless words, poetry, when there’s suffering in the world?

In a strategic misstep, beauty often evades the charge of being pointless by conflating itself with suffering. It’s almost gotten so that beauty is inconceivable without suffering. After all, what would be the point? Suffering makes beauty salable. Read my novel of a suffering hero who overcame insurmountable odds to achieve an extraordinary redemption thereby attesting to the resilience of the human spirit and other important stuff (until we discover that the redemption came with the help of steroids, at which point we substitute our second favourite emotion—outrage, and we vent it as righteous indignation). How dare you dupe us with something so pointless as a narrative without suffering, an aimless trajectory, a Rolex minus the hands?

I get annoyed at arts advocates who try to justify the arts by suggesting that, in fact, the arts are good for the economy. Fuck the economy. Suppose there were sex advocates who tried to justify having sex by announcing that sex is good for the economy. I can’t imagine myself responding: “Oh, well, thank god there’s a decent rationale for having sex; I was beginning to feel guilty about all the unjustified sex I was having.” I have sex because I like sex. Nobody needs to justify it for me. And I’m not about to refrain from having sex until there’s an end to all suffering in the world. I can have sex AND care that there is suffering in the world. But I don’t feel compelled to talk about both concerns in the same fucking sentence.

The same holds for the way I use words. I do what I do because I love doing it. I don’t do it out of duty. I don’t do it because it’s useful. And I certainly don’t do it to make money. There is no reason for it, and the less I concern myself with reason, the better I get at my unreasonable craft. That, at least, is the theory.

Unfortunately, that’s where I run over a paradoxical bump. After years of blogging, I’ve worked most of the aboutness out of my system. I’m ready to blog about nothing and hope that, as a result, my writing will get that much better. The problem is that, with nothing left to blog about, I spend a lot of time doing other things, the sort of things that don’t involve cranking out words, things like street photography, macramé, evening walks with my lover, volunteering in the community, ignoring the internet. Now that I have nothing to say, my writing is so good it’s invisible. That may make for a slim volume when I publish a “best of” anthology to mark nouspique’s 20th anniversary. We’ll see.

Thanks for reading. Drop by my blog for a visit from time to time.

Part Ten

About The Author

David Allan Barker is a Toronto native. He once thought he would be a concert pianist but had the sense to realize that he had much skill but no talent. Instead, he studied literature at a university. He graduated at the height of Reaganomics and Thatcherism and, succumbing to the disease of the times, made a Faustian pact with a law school. Unfortunately, the devil reneged on his promise; the law never made Mr. Barker rich and, what’s worse, left him without poetry in his veins. For years, he wandered the earth, an anemic shell of a man. Then he found Jesus and studied theology. That fucked his brain for life. He should have stuck with the lying cheat of a devil. Without either the devil or Jesus to guide him, Mr. Barker reverted to his literary past. Since then, he has cranked out three novels and two collections of short-stories. Coming soon: Life In The Margins—a serialized tale of sex, murder, insanity and … systematic theology. Visit http://nouspique.com for updates.