More on Masks

Masks are in the news almost every day: who wears them. and who doesn’t..

Recently a journalist made reference to the Premier’s mask slipping during his explanation for the unnecessary snap election in B.C. In Ali Smith’s brilliant novel Summer, a 13-year old boy states that all politicians wear masks. It got me thinking about masks and our reaction to them. About politicians and the things they say.

As an MP, shortly before being elected Prime Minister, Boris Johnson compared women who wear the burka to "bank robbers” and “letterboxes.” We’ve now become used to politicians making racist remarks about foreigners, and also to them expressing a distaste for masks.

Masks are tricky. We’re sometimes frightened when we can’t see someone’s full face, even though our view of a person without a mask is often of a persona, rather than an authentic self. In Jungian terms, the persona refers to a mask we wear in public to impose a false image about ourselves. As Jung said, a persona is the individual's system of adaptation to, or the manner he assumes in dealing with, the world. The word persona derives from Latin and originally referred to a theatrical mask.

Wiktionary connects the etymology of the word mask with the Middle-French masque (“a covering to hide or protect the face”), the Italian maschera (“mask, disguise”), Medieveal Latin masca, mascus (nightmare, ghost”), and the Old English grima (whence “grime.”) The connection with grima is interesting, as that was the name of one of Tolkien’s most unpleasant characters in Lord of the Rings. Grima was said to be a proficient liar and good at persuading people. Politics, yet again.

In indigenous cultures, a mask frequently carries ceremonial meaning, and the storyteller or dancer who wears a mask may represent a bear, a raven, an eagle or an ancestor. Often these masks propose the possibility of change, as with the contemporary Transformation Mask by Nuxalk artist Marven Tallio which is currently at the National Gallery on loan from the Canadian Museum of History: https://www.gallery.ca/magazine/your-collection/at-the-ngc/guiding-the-gallery-elders-community-members-and-indigenous. Even viewed digitally, such a mask conveys powerful authority and significance.

There are, of course, lots of references to masks in theatre through the centuries. I especially like the ones related to Dionysus who was much admired in ancient Greece, Earlier this month a 2,300 year-old mask was found in Turkey and is believed to have been used in a ritual ceremony involving Dionysus: https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/ancient-god-archeology-greece-turkey-22740505

Dionysus was a popular god, being associated with wine, music, ritual madness and parties of every kind. People wore masks in his honour, and he sometimes wore them himself. In the Bacchae, Dionysus wears a feminine mask and disguises himself effectively as a foreign stranger. He’s a god for all seasons, and legend has it that paying homage to him frees one from secret desires and regrets!

I found when I was searching for images of masks at art galleries – an enjoyable pastime – that I had to scroll past many, many advertisements for contemporary facemasks before reaching the actual site of the gallery. I learned that art galleries and museums are all now selling very beautiful face masks as fundraisers to offset financial losses caused by reduced attendance.

There’s great variety in contemporary masks, including one being created by an Israeli jeweller for a very wealthy young American man who requested that it be the most expensive mask in the world. I believe it shall be, since it will cost 1.5 million dollars and be made of 18-karat gold encrusted with 3600 white and black diamonds. One can find many much less expensive yet still whimsical face masks: designer masks, artistic masks, some with political messages, and some supporting charities. Unlike the terrifying bird-beaked masks worn by doctors during the Elizabethan plague years, many of these are beautiful and serve as fashionable accessories.

The mask is clearly an important symbol of our time. Future dictionary definitions may well include a reference to “a face covering used to protect the wearer and others against Covid-19.”

I was pleased to read a brief from the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads which found that Canadian attitudes for and against wearing masks in response to COVID-19 are, in contrast to the U.S., dispersed across the political spectrum, and that the majority of Canadians support wearing masks in public spaces: https://cascadeinstitute.org/isc-brief/behind-the-mask-anti-mask-and-pro-mask-attitudes-in-north-america/

Masks have always been with us. Why do we wear them? Well, why not? These days they signify respect, common sense, care for others and hope for the future.

Good reasons.

Frogs, Oxen and Long Spoons

The word “inured” usually refers to one having accepted something unpleasant: being habituated, toughened, hardened, etc. I’m impressed with the ways in which so many of us are becoming accustomed to the restrictions of the coronavirus. I wonder, are we becoming inured?

The dictionary proposes that the opposites of inured are words like weakened, enfeebled, burnt-out. Are there only two options: inured or enfeebled? If so, inured would be surely my choice.

In the happy, long-ago days when I lived with my husband on Protection Island at the edge of the ocean, I swam several times a day in good weather and tried to extend the swimming season late into the fall. One year I was determined to swim until the end of November. My husband encouraged me by recounting the tale of Milo of Croton who was a great hero in 16th century Greece. According to the story, Milo built up his strength by carrying a calf on his shoulders every day until it became an ox. Every day, as he grew sturdier, he became inured to the task.

I quit my daily swims midway into November, but I think I was wiser than Milo who, later in life and overly proud of his strength, attempted to tear a tree apart until his hands became caught in the tree. He was then surprised and devoured by a pack of wolves.

Know when to quit and always treat trees with respect was my takeaway message from that story.

The other fable that comes to mind for me these days is the one about the frog who is placed in a pot of cold water which is gradually heated. Unable to detect the gradually increasing heat, the frog relaxes and is slowly cooked to death. Neither of these stories offer appealing choices at this time of Covid. Is that all there is?

But no, I remembered the parable of The Long Spoon. This story explains that in hell people gather around a pot of delicious stew but, because the handles of their spoons are longer than their arms, they cannot bring the stew to their mouths and thus are starved to death. In heaven, people learn to reach out, share, and feed one another, and they thrive happily together.

These old fables are instructive. It’s good to be inured and strengthened, but we don’t want to get too comfortable when things heat up around us. Whatever stresses we’re feeling these days, many of us are in the presence of abundance. If we accept our interdependence and learn to help each other out and to share, we’ll get through these trying times.

As Minister Dix has often pointed out, we’re all in this together.

And we need to be all in.

Difficult Times

If you’ve ever taken music lessons, you probably remember having to count out the number of beats in a bar and supplying whatever crotchets or quavers or rests were needed to make the notation match the time signature. In the early years, you mostly had to learn 4/4 or 3/4 or maybe 2/4 time signatures, but later you encountered difficult time signatures like 5/4 (Dave Brubeck’s Take Five) or 13/8 (Main Theme from The Terminator) or 3/32 (Telemann’s Gulliver Suite). Bach used strange times in his Well Tempered Clavier and The Beatles employed a number of them in Happiness is a Warm Gun. Musicians know about difficult times.

When we met for coffee recently, my friend Kathryn-Jane was sporting a These are Difficult Times T-shirt with musical staffs showing 13/8 and 6/4 time signatures. And she told me about how choral music was helping her through these difficult times, even though she was no longer able to meet with her beloved choir. In fact, she said, some of her new musical experiences were thrilling: joining a 1500 voice international choir via Zoom. Attending a one-week Zoom music camp which featured some of the best voices in Canada and working with them to sing Bach’s Magnificat. Without the virus, she wouldn’t have had these opportunities. Here’s a link to one of the recordings of the Self-Isolation Choir in which Kathryn participated: https://youtu.be/Ye_A-ebDsj8

Many musicians are entertaining and educating us through our viral challenges. Listening to Vancouver Phoenix Choir’s version of Billy Joel’s The Longest Time made me feel that I was not alone. Indeed, the song stayed with me as an ear worm for several weeks and it was reassuring: https://phoenixchoir.com/2020/04/the-longest-time-quarantine-edition

Symphonies around the world are currently making their concerts available online, and many small musical groups are performing in small or large venues with social distancing and audiences of fewer than fifty people. Some offer excellent short programs such as the Victoria Baroque’s Music for the Pause series: https://victoria-baroque.com/

I like the possibilities that can arise from referring to this time as The Pause. In music, as in verse, the caesura is a space between notes or phrases which separates what went before and what comes after. It gives us a chance to catch our breath.

My daughter tells me that in Shakespeare’s plays, the caesura signals a dramatic pause and also a change. What comes after will not be as it was before, she says. It’s a launching into something else.

It was Mozart who declared that “The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between." Both Claude Debussy and Miles Davis said something very similar -- and all three were drawing attention to the potential of the pause. Maybe, when we move forward, we will have learned from these standstills.

At times, though, feeling trapped in a pause makes us uneasy. Here, again, musicians can offer a different way of approaching things. My friend Gwyneth, a harpist, tells me that sometimes when her small chamber group gets stuck in rehearsing a piece, they jump to the end and play the last bar, and then the second to the last bar, and then work backwards from there, which heartens them. When they return, they are ready to work through the problems.

I see it as a way of throwing a hook out into the future. You hope to catch on to something that will pull you forward. It reminds me of that beautiful choral song Woyaya, the lyrics of which were written by Annie Masembe from Uganda. Woyaya, in a Ghanaian language, means “we keep going”:

We are going … heaven knows where we are going,

But we know within.

And We will get there … heaven knows how we will get there,

But we know we will.

So I plan to keep going by signing up for some events – courses, commitments, concerts – that will take me into the spring. It helps create a feeling that a tangible future lies ahead.

And I’m determined to make the most of the silences and spaces in between those events. I will practice the Covid Caesura.

The Pause.

Zoom Heaven

 

 

 As we often say, the virus has brought us many gifts. One of the most surprising is the spike in digital communications. Everything is online which is a very mixed blessing. It’s nice to connect with doctors without spending hours in their waiting room surrounded by people who are coughing, sneezing, or groaning. On the other hand, many of us have complaints about technological glitches that force us to recover passwords or security codes or fix our computers without any access to actual human beings.

 At the top of the list of new challenges is ZOOM.  Who ever heard of it before March? Who had the foresight to invest in it? Now many of us are zooming every day, either rejoicing in or rebelling against its enforced presence in our Covid world. Some people are happy with the ease and comfort of working from home; others miss the socializing that workplaces provided. Grandparents living a distance away from their families are now becoming familiar with Zoom, and they love the opportunity to see and interact with grandchildren.

Some of us love Zoom, some of us hate it, some both love and hate it. Some have written about the love/hate relationship they have with Zoom, about how it can create moments of intimacy and also of resentment:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/20/zoom-calls-family-painful

Recently, I’ve been thinking of Zoom as something like Heaven, although I know that a great many teachers and professors and their students feel differently and, understandably, may find it to be Hellish. Like Heaven, it's hard to get into.

I’m old enough to be captivated by it and to find it remarkable. What would my grandparents think of Zoom? It would surely appear miraculous, inconceivable. I remember my grandmother telling me about the magic of hearing a human voice by means of a crystal set. Though she was familiar with telegrams, it was not until she was middle-aged that she had a telephone and much later before she had a black-and wife TV set. My parents had a hi-fi set and coloured TV, but they never had a computer, nor a cell phone.

They would have marvelled at all the wireless capacity we have. How could it be possible to do so many things from a distance: open doors, turn on stoves and computers, dictate and print out documents while driving our cars? All without any wires or cables? Incredible!

There’s a famous poem by Henry Scott-Holland that says, “Death is nothing at all … I have only slipped away into the next room”:

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/death-is-nothing-at-all

Zoom feels a bit like that. Though people are very far away, on Zoom it’s as though they are just in the next room.

As I try to imagine the multiple universes within which our earth is a mere dot, I wonder if somewhere in a distant galaxy there could not be some interstellar server which picks up all the details in our lives and those of our loved ones. Perhaps it could gather them together for us when we leave this mortal coil. After all, doesn’t the very name, Zoom, conjure up the world of Marvel comics and superheroic feats?

For some of us, one of the gifts from the coronavirus is time to imagine. To conjure up fantasies about all things great and small, visible and invisible.

Tomorrow I may be complaining about the various diabolical aspects of Zoom communications, but for tonight I’m happily visualizing the possibilities of Zoom Heaven.