Eminently Presentable Men

Over the last several weeks there has been much talk about Judge Kavanaugh and the other men who approved his nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States. Many of us felt a sense of incongruity as we watched the line-up of nicely turned out, well-dressed men, emanating wealth and privilege while listening to testimonies of violent sexual assault.

Throughout my childhood and teenage years, I saw power as symbolized by confident men in dark suits. They embodied authority and were not to be questioned. Sometimes I felt there was something under the surface that was to be feared, though I could not say what it was.

Recently, talking to a friend about such men, D.H. Lawrence’s poem called How Beastly the Bourgeois Is sprang to mind:  

How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species —

Presentable, eminently presentable — shall I make you a present of him?
 
Isn’t he handsome? Isn’t he healthy? Isn’t he a fine specimen?
Doesn’t he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside?
Isn’t it God’s own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn’t you like to be like that, well off, and quite the thing

Oh, but wait!
Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another
man’s need,
let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life
face him with a new demand on his understanding
and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.
Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully.
Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new
demand on his intelligence,
a new life-demand.

How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species —
Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable — 
and like a fungus, living on the remains of a bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life
than his own.

And even so, he’s stale, he’s been there too long.
Touch him, and you’ll find he’s all gone inside
Just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.
 Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings
rather nasty — 
How beastly the bourgeois is!

Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp England
what a pity they can’t all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly
into the soil of England.

Lawrence wrote this poem almost century ago in another country but it still resonates. He specifically points at the male of the species, but surely a finger must also be pointed towards the females who stand behind most of these men, enabling them to stay “sleek and erect and eyeable” so that they too can suck their lives out of the remains of others.

The Bright Side

 

 

The ferries from Departure Bay to Horseshoe Bay are more crowded than ever. Even traveling on a weekday afternoon you will be glad of a reservation. And the traffic on the mainland is busier than ever so you'll be creeping along the Upper Levels highway long before you reach Taylor Bay. As you inch your way down towards Marine Drive, you'll see an advertisement for a new development billed as “a prestigious enclave on a natural rise” and featuring a Presentation House. Language these days is hyperbolic and always requires some translation. They’re actually just talking about a demo suite for some exorbitantly expensive townhouses on a sidehill.

 

But I’m learning to be positive about change, attempting to look on the bright side. As I drive across the Lion’s Gate Bridge I make a point of enjoying the view that looks like one of the Margraf paintings we so admired in the Seventies: blue-grey water and sky, shadows of mountains, ethereal skyscrapers against the Vancouver skyline. Of course there are a lot more of these gigantic structures now than there were then, and they do grow taller and more plentiful.

 

I don’t allow myself to drift into negative thoughts about the overcrowded downtown, the horrendous real estate prices, the homelessness. Instead, I take the first turn from the bridge and follow the winding paths of Stanley Park, through the trees and on to familiar landmarks: the totem poles, Siwash Rock, the Hollow Tree, Prospect Point. All preserved as they should be, although there are more cars, more parking spaces, and at least sixteen signs saying Pay Here, Pay Here, Pay Here.

 

Looking on the bright side, it’s a real pleasure to see so many people enjoying the park and the beach as they have done for at least the past ten or twelve decades, and the Sylvia Hotel has the solid elegance that impressed me on my first visit over six decades ago. The hotel, an inspiration when I was a teenager and my Vancouver bolthole for a great many later years, seems pleasantly unchanged, its stone and ivy façade as reassuringly tasteful as ever. But when I am signing in to the Sylvia, the young woman at the front desk asks me for photo ID as well as my credit card. This has never happened before. I used to know most of the staff, and even last year I received a Christmas card from the hotel which was signed by many of them. Happily, at least Wally is still here, hoisting bags, carrying trays, doing whatever is needed. As always.

 

Change is everywhere, but it doesn’t have to be all bad. As Alice Walker said, “You’ve got to learn to ride with it and even enjoy it.” Change does always extend possibility for improvement. After all, the infant mortality rate has been greatly reduced, dental care has been vastly improved, we have very impressive medical technology, illiteracy has decreased significantly. Our lifestyles have changed: smoking has become socially unacceptable; fitness has become fashionable, ethnic foods are now widely available. Lots of small but positive change has taken place.

 

Laws change, governments change, social patterns change. Often such shifts seem to be for the worse, but, in fact, they needn’t be. If millions of people could quit smoking, surely it is possible for us to elect good governments, to reduce climate change, create a just society.

 

I’m determined to be positive. Things look desperate yet, as Martin Luther King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” However, unless we are prepared to wait for a very long time, we might just need to put quite a bit of weight behind it.

Making Connections

 

 

In my mid-teens, I began to go to parties and hang out in the recreation rooms of friends who were experimenting with quantities of beer and pink gin, and my mother issued a stern warning: “Dypsomania runs in the family.”

 

The expression puzzled me. I gathered that she was issuing a warning about the danger of alcoholism but, as with her embarrassed explanations about how pregnancy resulted from a meeting of sperm and an ovum, there was a disconnect. In her lecture, the mystifying encounter in the fallopian tubes did not appear to involve actual sex as far as my limited pre-teen knowledge could register. Sex was invisible in those years, as were the dypsomaniacs said to be running around within my family.

 

Growing up, I watched my parents drink cups of tea each evening and only rarely offering pre-dinner drinks to guests. At Christmas or New Year’s Eve, there were some celebratory drinks but I didn’t see excessive imbibing. Only in their later years did my parents start to drink wine at dinner and have the occasional cocktail or an after dinner liqueur.

 

Not so with me. I drank unrestrainedly from my teenage years through my youth and on to my older years. Nothing was ever said about it. But, I have realized, people rarely tell you that you are drinking too much, even when it’s apparent.

 

Similarly, people rarely point out that you are eating too much, driving your car too much, traveling too much, buying too many new appliances or renovating your house too often. You might observe an occasional raised eyebrow, a knowing smile, a slight shaking of the head, but nobody will actually confront you about excessive behaviour.

 

Recently I visited a friend in the hospital who’d been advised that he should cut back on alcohol, which didn’t come as a surprise to him. “I’ve been drinking far too much,” he said. “You know how it is: one drink is too many and two drinks are not enough.” I was surprised at this, as I’d always heard it the other way around: one not enough and two too many. But his version fits better. For many of us, once we’ve had the second drink, we want more and don’t stop.

 

We have an insatiable appetite for more of everything: more drink, more food, more holidays, more beautiful houses, a better car, a bigger boat, the latest of technological computers, telephones, toys of all sorts. We consume and consume, and we continue to fill up the landfill. We take up more and more room, forgetting that old maxim that if one isn’t living one the edge then one is taking up too much space.

 

Reducing excessive consumption requires making connections. I and most of my cohort find it very hard to do -- but I believe that many young people are getting the message. Perhaps because of necessity and lack of opportunity, they do not see it as an expectation or entitlement that they will own their own home. A lot of them seem to prefer bikes to cars, and a great many of them are keen on buying locally and growing their own food.  I think they see a different way of living on the planet. I hope so.

 

And I too will try to do better.

 

 

Looking and Seeing: Responding to Our Tent City

 

 

“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.” So says John Berger in Ways of Seeing, his acclaimed book about how we look at art.

 

Seeing involves perception whereas looking is merely turning one’s eyes at another person or object. Seeing and being seen is, according to many therapists, the way in which humans connect meaningfully.

 

But seeing involves more than just looking, and Berger hints at that when he refers to the child recognizing as well as merely looking. Berger goes on to speak about our developing awareness of the fact that we can also be seen: The eye of the other combines with our own eye, he says, “to make it fully credible that we are ourselves a part of the visible world.” We are not alone. We are seen and recognized.

 

But sometimes the eye of the other may block us out. I know a man who can look a person in the eye in a way that prohibits any connection as he withdraws himself from the other’s gaze, his eyes a blankness, his face a mask. This demeanor is not a conversation starter and usually results in his companion speaking inanely or falling into silence. And I know a woman whose eyes turn black and glittering and dart from side to side when she is angry. The recipient of this gaze will often find a reason to apologize or excuse herself.

 

These are both ways of looking, but not of seeing. And they are powerful. It is not for nothing that we have the expressions like If looks could kill!

 

Such cruel looks are frequently directed at homeless people or the residents of our Tent City. The city has now issued an eviction notice, ordering these people to move on. but the residents say they will not leave.

 

Dickens gave us a vision of a similar situation in his novel Bleak House in which the policeman who holds the arm of Jo the crossing sweeper complains that he has told Jo to “move on” and Jo won’t go. The homeless boy responds as follows:

 

 “I’m always a-moving on, sir,” cries the boy, wiping away his grimy tears with his arm. “I’ve always been a moving and a moving on, ever since I was born. Where can I possibly move to, sir, nor more I do move!”

Dickens, journalist, novelist and social reformer, reflects on this problem through the voice and vision of the empathic narrator:

“Do you hear, Jo? It is nothing to you or to anyone else, that the great lights of the parliamentary sky have failed for some few years, in this business, to set you the example of moving on. The one grand recipe remains for you — the profound philosophical prescription — the be-all and the end-all of your strange existence upon earth. Move on! You are by no means to move off, Jo, for the great lights can’t at all agree about that. Move on!”

Throughout his life Dickens wrote about the problems of the poor and the need for social reform. He is often credited with having contributed to major social reforms at the time.

Bleak House was written one hundred and sixty-five years ago, yet much of it still feels quite current.

His is a voice we need today and, with the decline of good investigative journalism, we feel the lack of it.

 

 

Good as Bread

Yesterday my friend Lucy came to visit and, as always, I was reminded of my husband’s remark that Lucy is “as good as bread.” The Italians have a saying, buono come il pane, literally meaning "as good as bread" but sometimes translated into "as good as it gets." Quintessential goodness.

 

I like this expression and it feels right. Bread is a basic food all over the world, whether it is roti, bannock, bagels, bannock, challah, chapatti, corn bread, pumpernickel, soda bread or any of the other varieties of the stuff. The staff that supports us. The staple in all out diets.

 

Important people have written about the importance of bread. Henry Miller has rhapsodized about rye bread, although in his essay “The Staff of Life” he complained that once could “travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread.” I think he was bemoaning the presence of Wonder Bread, which is less ubiquitous in these foodie times.

 

There are lots of religious references to bread I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever (John 6:51) and Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do (Ecclesiastes 9:7). We may thank God for our daily bread; it’s a symbol of what we need to survive. Margaret Atwood in her essay on bread uses it as a metaphor to illustrate problems of starvation and suffering.

 

It’s easy to accept the goodness of bread. It’s also easy to spot goodness when we see that quality in others. But, in a world in which happiness and success seem often to be equated with the acquisition of material goods and the scrabble to get more than one’s share, it’s not seen as often as one might like.

 

Asked whether she believed in God, Carol Shields answered, “No. Human goodness is the only thing I believe in.” Me too, when I see it. Shields also said, “I do feel this sense of goodness is part of our human conversation — the biggest part of it. In Shield’s last novel, Unless, the protagonist’s traumatized daughter, Norah, spends her days sitting “cross-legged with a begging bowl in her lap” on a street corner in Toronto, the word “GOODNESS” written on a cardboard sign hanging around her neck.

 

 Like Norah, many of us long for goodness these days. Like bread, it is the staff of life and it sustains us. The word “staff” can also mean a support, a cane, a walking stick. Perhaps a shillelagh.

 

But we may need a winnowing stick to find it.

 

 

Winnowing

Last week I received a package in the mail from a faraway friend of my youth: a beautiful silver and amber ring that I remember from a long ago time in Montreal when she and I would meet on Saturday mornings at the Luxor Café on Ste. Catherine’s Street to talk about love and life and books. In the accompanying message she wrote that she was sending the ring because she was “winnowing” things, noting that it is a lovely word.

 

It is indeed a lovely word, one which has many meanings. When I mention it to elderly friends, they too claim to be in the process of winnowing. Their process that sounds something like Swedish death cleaning, i.e. chucking things out in order to diminish the workload that may be left for others after one dies.

 

Farmers speak of winnowing wheat, or winnowing rice, depending on their country. The dictionary definition refers to freeing grain from the lighter particles of chaff. When the grain is thrown into the air, the wind blows away the impurities. To winnow is to distinguish the valuable from worthless. To separate the wheat from the chaff.

 

Another dictionary definition for winnowing is “to pursue a course with flapping wings in flying,” Bird watchers sometimes refer to the winnowing flight of snipe, a delightful aural image.

Many poets spoke of "winnowing." In his poem "Autumn," Keats spoke of "the winnowing wind," and a collection of WW I poetry is ominously titled "The Winnowing Fan."

There are also references in the bible. Proverbs 20:8 states that when a king sits on his throne to judge he “winnows out all evil with his eyes,” a useful ability for a judge. A very large task as well, given all the evil in the world.

In Jeremiah, we read "I will send foreigners to Babylon to winnow her and to devastate her land” and “I will winnow them with a winnowing fork at the city gates of the land. I will bring bereavement and destruction on my people, for they have not changed their ways."

I was thinking about winnowing when I read about the wealthy men in three-piece suits rioting at Ascot recently. A far cry from “My Fair Lady.” The papers demanded that something needed to be done to keep “these people” out, and a reader commented, “What people? Rich people?” Commenting on the behaviour of these privileged people, someone noted that one could be a future prime minister.

The images of high school shootings makes on think of the need for winnowing out the lawmakers who do not support gun control.

When I see the increasing number of homeless people, miserably curled up in doorways or ditches I know that we have to work at winnowing out city counselors who have dropped the ball on low-cost housing initiatives.

The world is in bad shape, globally and in my own small town.

I won’t resort to knives, but I do wonder where I can get one of those biblical winnowing forks.

Lilac Time

 

A few days ago I gave a reading and talk about my recent book Miranda’s Owl at Hospice Nanaimo. I’d had a few other book readings and the discussions had gone well but this one was different, as the audience was made up primarily by Hospice clients, counsellors and staff, all people who had suffered intense grief, some very recently. I wanted to be sure that my talk connected with people in a respectful way. I was a bit anxious but just as I entered the room a dear friend placed a bowl of lilacs on the table beside me and the scent of those lovely blooms was with me throughout the reading. It felt right.

For me, lilacs always evoke remembrance, loss and renewal. I think of T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

 

Memory and desire take me back to my childhood home in which every April my mother gathered lilacs and the house was filled with that delicate purple perfume. Later in the summer there were bowls of sweet peas but it was the lilacs that signaled the return of spring and newness. During those days we often had family singsongs and one of my uncles used to like to sing Ivor Novello’s We’ll Gather Lilacs in the Spring.

Every April I recall taking the bus to UBC in 1958 to see a performance of Marcel Dubé’s play Les Temp des Lilas. I was fifteen years old and thought I’d never seen anything so moving and so sad. My French was not good but I understood enough that the play set my desire to move to Montreal. Years later when I was living in Montreal with my husband I learned that he too, then twenty-one, had been at that same performance.

Still later, when we lived on Protection Island, we had four lilac trees outside our home: purple, light blue and white. The white were the most fragrant and I had them in vases in the kitchen and living room. Nowadays I live in a townhouse and there are no lilacs to gather, so when I first see a lilac in bloom I consider stealing branches to bring home. It’s lucky to have a good friend who will bring me a bowl of lilac at just the right moment.

          Last night I went to the Ou gallery in Duncan for an opening of Montreal artist Xan Shian’s exhibit called Eulogy of Gravity. I found her watery images evocative and was moved by the essay accompanying her works in which she writes:

The concentration of experience files itself deep within our bodies, an archival register for moments. We carry our experiences with us, like bones they grow and shift over the course of a life, break, disintegrate and return to earth. As pieces of ourselves they form bridges, infancy to childhood, to adolescence through adulthood and old age; they determine the things we hold on to or let go of.

 

Afterwards I went for a beer with an old friend and, while talking about memories, I asked what association he had with lilacs. Without a pause, he recited Walt Whitman:

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,

And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

 

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,

Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,

And thought of him I love.

 

Sometimes everything seems to connect.

 

 

 

Spreading the Word

It's hard enough to write a book but it's even harder to try to promote it. Very successful writers have agents and publishers who do that work for them but for people like me, with a small publisher like Oolichan, it's not easy. That's why it's a wonderful thing to have a friend like Frances (Materfamilias) who has a splendid blog with a great many followers.

I've never been a fan of social media but, when I see the effect that someone like Frances can have in connecting with many people and sharing her enthusiasm about what she is reading, writing and thinking, I realize I have to shift my attitude. Which means I am going to try to learn something about social media and see if I can make something of my own sporadic blogging attempts. At least I will try to write more frequently.

Frances is a wonderful writer and I was moved and encouraged by her card to me:

The book is wonderful -- I'm already halfway through now and you're right -- there is much in it to alleviate the tears. Most of all, a great big love story, and then the lashings of humour, your examination of words, the literary references, the various geographies. It's very rich for such a small book. I marvel most at how much work it must have taken to rein in emotions while giving your reader enough detail to make your wisdom on bereavement convincing. Platitudes wouldn't work, obviously, but neither would overwhelming your reader with the raw personal. Managing to keep that tone, the intimacy of a letter to Mike, knowing we're reading over your shoulder, that must have been tough, technically and emotionally.

Read the whole post here:

http://materfamiliasknits.blogspot.ca/2018/04/a-memoir-of-love-and-grief-bereavement.html

Isn't she a wonderful writer? I'm very grateful for her kind words and for the response from her many readers. She is an inspiration and her blog is well with following.

The last time I looked there were 35 comments on this post, with many people indicating that they were ordering the book because of what Frances wrote.

It's been an eye-opener. And a heart-opener. And that's why I am making a commitment to work on this blog.

Thank you, Frances.

Once there were Words

Words have always been a great solace to me. I am moved by sentences like Anthony Doerr’s Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. Just the phrase “sounds ribbon in shoals” is a thrill to me. Even a single word – P.K. Page’s choice of the word catafalque in her phrase the tall eventual catafalque -- brings me delight.

 

Between words and silence, there is nonsense. Like most families, we had our own language which contained baby talk or verbal blunders that stuck simply because we liked the sound. Eedie go me, a small child’s instruction that her babysitter should not attempt to change her diapers, expressed a desire to be set free. Geeba, the ubiquitous cry we seemed to hear at the dog park, perhaps related to the many dogs named Sheba, became our word for foolish people. A childhood friend of mine came up with the evocative words wallen and smeedmut to describe her moods of melancholy and frustration, terms I still use. I can’t remember the source for our word mimpering, but it seemed a good description for a particular kind of idle meandering. Often we would mimper away an entire afternoon. Nonsense has its place.

Sometimes there are no words to capture our feelings and we fall silent: Silence is deep as Eternity, Thomas Carlyle said, speech is shallow as Time. Silence is the other side of a love of language, and too can speak to us.

Illiteracy is another matter. A local business uses its road sign to display jokes that are often clever if not profound. Recently it featured this riddle: How do you get two whales in a car? Start in England and drive west. Of course you have to be able to read in order to get the joke, and many won’t, as illiteracy is on the rise. It helps if you read it out loud.

Nowadays, videos have replaced written instructions. Pictures have replaced words. The world leader most frequently in the news these days is often nonverbal: he avoids verbs in favour of one-word verdicts: sad, bad, lies.

We speak in hyperbole of awesome restaurants, amazing journeys. Slushy, feel-good words and  phrases like “It’s a journey” and “I want to honour your experience” replace precise language. Order a cappuccino and your server will say, “Awesome!” Words, if they are used at all, are tossed about with little regard for their meaning.

Nowadays, words fail us. Or we fail them. Now we communicate through emoticons, acronyms, numerals and verbal grunts. We can only wonder about where this rough beast that is, now, slouching towards us will take us.

Another year - April 2018

Another year. Another year and 4 months. Another failed resolution. BUT another new resolution as well.

 

From now on I will keep up this blog. I will add new information, post events, enter into discussions, and rant regularly. I will start by posting an old rant and continue by writing new ones.

 

Here goes…