Words

When my father died five years ago, my reaction was mainly philosophical.  He had been ill and largely silent for so long that each time I'd leave him, I assumed it was the last time we'd see one another.  I'd get on the plane in Atlanta and begin my mourning, making notes for poems like "Moving Day in Georgia."  When he died, I lived with more deliberation, made choices that before wouldn't even have seemed like choices.  I said "No."   (In fact, my father's last words were appropriately rebellious.  He told his nurse "No!  I'll eat tomorrow!")

My mother's death has been quite different.  During the last week, I've felt periods of normalcy, even moments of relief.  I'd find myself worrying about how we're going to manage inserting an IV when the next UTI invades her body, then remember that the need to worry about how frightened and resistant she could be is over.  But there have also been times when my feelings of loss seemed to arrive in a blue, nameless mood.  I feel homeless in a peculiar way.  There are other metaphors; my friend Jeanne Shami talked about feeling as if her orbit has lost its gravitational centre.

For years, deconstructionists like Derrida argued that there was no transcendental signifier, no single word like "God" or "being" that guaranteed the meaning of other words.  We live in a sea of    differences where each word is only partly defined by what it is not.  Cat is not bat, because one begins with C and the other with B. 

[We might have gotten the two confused, however, when the two words merged for an instant above my bed last summer when my cat Sheba brought down a bat with a single deadly accurate leap, paws outstretched.  I rescued the bat, which lived to echolocate the tale.] 

More recently, Derrida has declared that the transcendental signifier is justice, a sentiment I share in my more optimistic moments.   Right now, people in Egypt and Libya and Yemen are hoping for this. 

In the face of such enormous brave hopes, I won't suggest that the transcendental signifier is "Mother," and besides I mean the comparison metaphorically, not literally.  It's as if "Mother" is a kind of primal word; when that word is gone, the meanings of other words shift and sway a little, as if blown by the wind, as if shrugging their shoulders with a question rather than firmly declaring their meaning.  Forgive me, then, if the title of the poem below seems all wrong to me:  memories, no matter how insubstantial they are, are never "nothing"; a life, even gone, is never nothing.  Yet that's the only word I've got.  Can you help me find a better one?  The poem is not just about "nothing," but about how hard it is, even for artists, to capture that moment when a person's will and breath disappear.

Learning to become nothing

I
Sleep is the first teacher,
sleep, and those moments on the bridge of waking when you knew
there were dreams that evaporated,
preferring to be a breath.

The lethargy of hot days
and the drugged sleep of convalescence teach
the slumbrous gravity of grace and grave,
the discipline of indifference, the sweet
lack of will.

II
The word "no" has been uttered without rancour--so easy
is it to peel the silver from the back of your mirror.
Routines go missing, arbitrary habits like brushing your teeth
and eating meals.  Evenings
are without incident, cycling round and round
like a left-handed child practicing cursive Os,
trying not to smudge the dusky blue ink.

III
This poem of nothing, of zero, of silent
seed pods is not
a pastoral.  There are no moons,
full or dark, waxing or waning:
Nothing ever changes.  There are no musicians, no mysterious
shadows in green glades,
It is not natur morte with blushing apples, translucent
grapes, drooping rose buds, its obsession
with an authenticity just this side of death.  It is not a portrait:  no pier glass
generously reflects the unseen side of your life.

It is about the lightness of hunger
you ignore, the way it blooms
like a golden Japanese lantern lit at dusk, and then,
jostled, consumes the colour that contained it. 

One night there is a taupe moth, wings like pleated linen,
a cobweb across the window.  The next night a little dust burns
against the light bulb, a white tangle sways in the corner of the sill.
Some small trace, a few deceptively tangled words rest
heavy in my hands.

Mortality, Craftsmanship, and Heidegger

Yesterday afternoon, some time between my reading of Being and Time and my work on the soft blue-green quilt for the bed in my study, my mother died in her sleep.  My sister had gone in to meet potential hospice workers, had arrived early, and so sat by my mother to smooth her sleeping forehead.  She got up briefly to look for something to clean Mother's wheelchair, came back, stroked her forehead again and found it already cool.  So I can add the words "died peacefully" to my mental obituary.

That is, until the emergency team arrived and attempted to revive a nearly ninety-six-year-old woman because it's the law and because the care facility couldn't find the Do Not Resuscitate orders until after the apologetic emergency guys had given up.  There have been times of late when I've watched the university become more legalistic, and observed "we have more rules and fewer principles."  Now I see this isn't simply the university; I'd known about litigious American society, but this was the time it really meant something,

Now I feel as if I'm left with blocks for an unfinished quilt, unread Heidegger, countless questions about what happened when, and my mother's favourite expressions.  My job is to find a form for all this.

Just this morning, I read Heidegger's analysis of how we come to understand being-with:  "This understanding [of co-existence], like all understanding, is not a knowledge derived from cognition, but a primordially existential kind of being which first makes knowledge and cognition possible.  Knowing oneself is grounded in primarially understanding being-with."  I understand why he wants "being-with" almost a priori, but Heidegger is perhaps only partly right here; knowing oneself isn't primordial unless parents and other caregivers are.  I was born in 1950, so knowing myself probably began with my mother.  More heartbreakingly, Heidegger talks about those moments when Da-sein loses itself, something my mother regularly did.   I know I'm reading Heidegger through the lenses of grief, but it's oddly as if grief allows me to see things I might not have noticed before.

It also feels like something has happened to history, as if it's been pulled from the straight, gone cattywampus.  While my mother only sometimes recognized me during my visit for her 95th birthday, all my unanswered questions were only theoretically unanswered.  You've got them too:  what happened the time when...?  What happened to so and so?  Who did you leave me with when you...?  (I don't think I ever saw them again.)  How did you feel when...?  And the big one:  "What's it like now?"  I've been teaching postmodern historiography in my Sixties class, so I've become aware of what Hans Kellner calls "the scandal of general discontinuity."  Kellner is speaking of our belief, on the one hand, that every person and event has left some historical trace that we can find and interpret; we like to believe in this continuity.  The lived reality is that a lot goes missing and never gets found, much less interpreted or interpreted "accurately" (whatever that might mean).

Like a lot of mothers in the fifties (and perhaps like all parents), mine was a mystery.  She had times of extraordinary joyfulness and playfulness and times of significant and debilitating depression which seemed to become worse the older she got, particularly once she and my father retired to Florida, worse again when they moved to Georgia in 2001.  Sometimes, in her anger, she seemed beyond reach, but then she could be suddenly enchanted by the sound of frogs in the Georgia night.  "Come listen" she would say, taking my hand--I who had two minutes before been the enemy who was exhorting her to take her anti-depressants.  Here is the paradox of parents:  on the one hand, they're the stick figures we know completely in our childhood and adolescence, people who are so simple we can read them like a book.  Later, they become much more complicated, but just as we are finally old enough and generous enough to finally ask "What is it like to be you?" they are gone.  When they die, our parents' complexity becomes multiplied like a smiling weeping puppet in a hall of mirrors.

Perhaps because I'm teaching a historical methods class, and because my reading of late has been so preoccupied with memory (see "Literature and Memory" post), my mother's death seems like a synecdoche for all the unobserved and unsung moments in our lives that, like the butterfly in the Amazon, might have led serendipitously to something more important.  Or like all those lives cut short by wars, violent acts, accidents--lives that we will never quite understand.  There's a theorist I quote in my article on Woolf's first experimental novel, Jacob's Room, who talks about the way the language of elegy dissolves around the edges because the place we want to get to--on the threshold to where the loved one is--is beyond language, much less experience.

What has been lingering in my mind and for some time (for I knew this was coming, though not how soon) are my mother's favourite expressions.  She often called me a mugwump, which was "a bolter from the Republican Party in 1884." Where she got the expression I'll never know; she probably liked the sound of it.  When I spent the day in bare feet or went outside without shoes, she would always ask "What are you doing frogging around in your bare feet?"  She talked about bad drivers who took their half out of the middle of the road.  She answered the phone "Joe's Bar and Grill" when she was pretty sure it was my father; sometimes she was wrong.  She called herself "Charlie's hand laundry" and "Chief cook and bottle washer."  She'd give you a Werthers from her stash in the car "To keep the starve-to-death away."

So here's the task I've been avoiding all day today, reading Heidegger, dashing to Golden Willow because I'm almost out of the raw silk I'm making my Crystal Leaves shawl out of (see Woolgathering post--I'll put up a photograph when it's blocked), writing a blog that I hope is not  opportunistic:  I've got to find the poem somewhere that manages to take these words that linger around the edges of my memory of her and manage to get them to articulate the mystery that was her experience of being herself.  In part, it's the perennial challenge of form and content.

Thank you for listening.  It's helped.  At least now I know what I'm supposed to do.

Guerilla Reading

The February break is upon us, and one of the things I hope to find time to do is read:  that completely engrossing kind of reading that ends with your looking up in surprise at discovering where you really are.  You know the kind of reading I mean.  You have walked onto the pages of the book, perhaps as a character or narrator or simply a hidden observer, to watch the events unfold, the characters struggle and triumph and birth and die, the world change for the better or the worse, turning now the young brilliant green of spring or suddenly plunged into the monochrome of winter.  Perhaps you finish the book.  Or maybe you finish a chapter and in the slight pause of turning a page and reading another title you notice that you are hungry or that the light outside has completely changed.  Maybe  your husband stands in the dining room telling you that dinner is ready--a fact you could have discerned if you had taken your head out of the book and smelled the world you are living in.  Your first reaction is surprise.  This is where I've been all this time?  I'd completely forgotten, so whelmed was I by this book, this story, this voice.

In her essay, "Reading," Virginia Woolf talks of another kind of reading altogether.  At the opening of the essay, she's visiting a country house with a distinguished library:  "I liked that room.  I liked the view across country that one had from the window, and the blue line between the gap of the trees on the moor was the North Sea.  I liked to read there.  One drew the pale armchair to the window and so the light fell over the shoulder upon the page....[S]omehow or another, the windows being open, and the book held so that it rested upon a background of the escallonia hedges and distant blue, instead of being a book it seemed as if what I read was laid upon the landscape not printed, bound, or sewn up, but somehow the product of trees and fields and the hot summer sky, the air which swam, on fine mornings, round the outlines of things" (Captain's Death Bed  151-152).  Woolf's description of the book merging with the landscape and in the process becoming unbound, is almost a metaphor for a different kind of reading, one that urges the reader to look up frequently to reflect, to consider the ideas on the page as they merge with the scene before her.  Sometimes I like to do this kind of reading in public places, coffee shops and comfortable chairs around campus, so that the scene before me helps me reflect on the book's relationship to the life I live.

I have some favourite places for what I call my guerilla reading; I've given it that name because I do it at unpredictable times or unusual places--usually places where no one can find me.  Stone's Throw, the coffee house kitty-corner from the U of R campus, is a great place to read poetry the first thing in the morning.  There a luscious decadence to starting the day reading the poems, say, of Don Domanski (most recently).  The ground floor of Research and Innovation Centre at 7:30 of a winter morning is wonderful for reading philosophy.  Between the north and south residence towers, you can watch the sun come up, watch the blinking Christmas lights flicker more and more indistinctly as you consider Heidegger's ideas about being.  It takes a bit of staring off into a space that's becoming saturated with colour to take Heidegger in.  I love the periodicals room on the sixth floor of Archer Library, except that the comfortable chairs in front of the windows are so often taken by sleeping undergraduates.  Coffee houses that give one a view of the street are also good places for guerilla reading.  Sometimes it's just the surprise of the light for the place and the time of day that makes my meditations on the book I am reading and the life I am living so intense and joyful--discovering light and the social life of the city and ideas all at the same time.

Neither the intense reading that forgets time and space nor the more diffuse kind of reading that attends to them are better than one another.  It would be easy to plunk mysteries in one category, philosophy in another, but they're really different relationships to the book, the world, and the self.  I hope to find time for both this week.

Where and when do you do your guerilla reading?  And what will you read this week?


The photograph above was taken in the Mendel Art Gallery's cafe by Veronica Geminder, whose work can be found here.

Craftsmanship and Mortality

My mother, who will be ninety-six next month, fell out of bed a couple of weeks ago in the middle of the night and had to go to the hospital for stitches and to make sure there hadn't been a stroke or some other kind of "episode" that caused the fall.  She hasn't really eaten since then, though she'll drink some chocolate-y Boost or suck on one of those lollypop sponges hospitals provide to moisten people's mouths.  My sister Karen, who is doing all the hard work of going to the hospital in the middle of the night or trying to figure out  the next phase of my mother's care in the confusing context of the U.S. health care system, says the doctor explained two things to her late this week.  First, the body and the mind, whose intertwining we all too often ignore in our healthier years, are almost indistinguishable in our nineties, so that episodes like falling out of bed have a profound impact on cognitive abilities; but when the episode is over, we don't go back to being the same person we were before the minor fall.  The doctor has also suggested that mother's refusal of food is the beginning of the end.  We obviously don't know why, whether she's lost her sense of the point of food, or whether some wisdom not snarled in the dementia says 'I'm tired.' 

First, let's be frank:  for the last ten years, Karen's done the heavy lifting. She's written checks and opened new accounts and filled out endless forms and cut out coupons for Depends--not to mention making frequent and always ill-timed trips to Emergency that are never short.  But that said, being hundreds of miles away has its challenges.  While Karen gives me complete reports, I can't quite grasp what's going on.  I can't simply stop in to see for myself what Mother's demeanour and frame of mind are like.  I have to imagine it.  I have a very good imagination, which is a mixed blessing.  To say someone has a good imagination is not necessarily to say that they have an accurate imagination.  Mine's been working overtime in the evenings and sometimes through the night.

Of course Bill and Veronica have been wonderfully supportive, but they can't simply climb into my head for the hours between 8 p.m. and about 2 a.m. when I wonder.  So I've turned to a resource that I suspect women have called on since time out of mind:  the work of their hands.  I've started a new and very complicated pair of socks.

But it's piecing quilts that has given me the most comfort and pleasure.  Quilting is a combination of zing and zen.  The zen comes at the end with the hand quilting, and as I wrote in my first Craftsmanship blog, when you're quilting by hand, time doesn't matter.  What matters is the size and straightness and evenness of each tiny stitch made with a thread that seems to connect one to every other woman who has tried to still her mind with the zen of hand quilting.  Piecing provides the zing.  The wonderful thing about quilting is that it has perameters--like the designs of particular blocks (there are literally hundreds of these)--that provide a framework for the quiltmaker's creativity.  Choosing fabrics and a block that will show them at their best, combining colour in a way that's harmonious yet unexpected or inventive, sewing the straight 1/4 inch seams and seeing your vision come together as the blocks take shape, deciding how you're going to pull the blocks together and seeing a whole quilt emerge--this is the zing of piecing.

The quilt at the top of the blog is made of baskets; if you look carefully at the design, you can see that many of these are different.  There are probably a dozen ways to represent a basket in the quilter's vocabulary.  This quilt was inspired by the butterfly fabric that you see in panels down the sides of the blocks, but I ended up using most of it to make a small joyful quilt--the colours are bright and snappy--for a friend of mine undergoing chemotherapy.  So I had to find a way to make a quilt with just a little left.  The solution was to make the top borders of an entirely different fabric, and I like the sense of "making it up as I go along" that this border gives the finished quilt.  That's what a lot of quilters do.  The colours in this quilt have given me enormous comfort and cheer over the last couple of weeks.

The two quilts you see above are made in the Amish style--which is to say that you only use plain colours.  I love making Amish quilts because they force you to return to the quilter's most basic vocabulary:  colour.  If you use a lot of black--a classic Amish practice--you can get almost any colours to go together.  The larger quilts, a Sunshine and Shadow, was made years ago.  I've been working on putting together the blocks for the small crib quilt in the last few weeks. 

One of the things that strikes me about Amish quilts is the paradox.  The Amish are a peace-loving people, and they refuse to fight in wars.  Yet their quilts are often characterized by a tension in the colours which makes them feel very modern.  Quite likely the tension sneaks in because they make their quilts out of the scraps left from their everyday sewing:  the quilt is just an instance of making do.  Yet the most gifted Amish quilters make an art out of it.



This photograph is of a quilt that I'm working on now.  It's a simple block, called a four patch.  But I've added small triangles at the corners of the lighest patches to give the blocks a focus when the four-patches are put together.  Here's where craftsmanship comes in big time:  getting all those tiny triangles together to make the little square requires all of one's skills on a sewing machine.  (You can only see the effect in some of the blocks, since I haven't joined them all together yet.)  Here I'm playing with colour yet again.  This quilt will go in a room that is sometimes green, sometimes blue, sometimes blue-green, sometimes grey, depending on the light.  So I've tried to put all those colours together to make a quiet harmony that still has some life.  The easy work is done:  I have a pile of about 150 of the four-patches.  Now I need to choose four that will go together, choose the fabric for the tiny triangles that will be balanced and harmonious when the block is put together, and get all those little triangles to line up into a square.

Unlike my mother's mortality, making this quilt is simply a problem to be solved.  Sometimes I give in to chance, and simply put together the next four four-patches on my pile.  Sometimes I find myself taking both sides in aesthetic quarrels about harmony and balance and the beauty of unpredictability.  Sometimes I sit down at my sewing machine and I'm only eyes and muscles, trying to sew those triangles accurately into little squares.  I cheer myself on and give myself a thumb's up when it goes well.  I'm not waiting; I'm engaged in the present moment.  Yet paradoxically, this escape brings me closer to her, creating a space where it's safe to think about mortality, to imagine my mother's negotiation of these final days, and to allow memories to float to the surface of my mind where they drift in their startling impermanence. Perhaps this is because craftsmanship threads together the traditions from the past, the present engagement in the making, and the imagination's vision.  Perhaps this is because we will always need the beauty and warmth of quilts.

Telling Stories

Prompted, perhaps, by North Americans' reaction to people of other races after September 11, Princeton Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote Cosmopolitanism:  Ethics in a World of Strangers.  As the title suggests, the central challenge he's trying to elucidate is how we relate ethically to people whose values are unfamiliar to us by virtue of race or religion.  One of the solutions he offers is telling and talking about stories.  Every culture, he points out, tells stories.  When we join reading groups or simply go for beer or coffee after a movie to talk about it, we're engaging in one of the most important things people do:  "evaluating stories together is one of the central human ways of learning to align our responses to the world.  And that alignment of responses is, in turn, one of the ways we maintain the social fabric, the texture of our relationships" (29).  He suggests elsewhere that listening to stories from different cultures and in turn telling our own stories is one of the ways we change the world a little bit without imposing our own worldviews on others.  Stories aren't (or shouldn't be) dogmatic or polemical; readers or listeners can take what they wish--whatever seems to them (in the argot of my students) "relatable."

I'm teaching a class in expository and persuasive writing this term.  Knowing that writing in the academy encourages students to adopt or create a voice that is not natural to them, I begin by having them write narrative and descriptive essays that force them to find their own voices.  The vague multi-syllabled Latinate language of academic writing doesn't convey the immediate experience we hope for when we read a good story, so they're forced back into their Anglo-Saxon roots for strong nouns and precise verbs.  In the age of Facebook status updates and 142-character tweets, I was delighted by the variety of stories they told and by their attention to language and narrative form.  They wrote about listening to stories and to the rhythm of the reader's breath while tracing raindrops down windows in Vancouver and about how this experience changed their relationships to words.  They wrote about struggling with their family's attitudes towards food; about witnessing surgery for the first time; about the family history suggested by an abandoned farmhouse, a few photographs, and a bird that suddenly bursts into the empty house, filling it with mystery and terror.  One young student compassionately described a father's need for alcohol, understanding all the physical and emotional wounds it salved.  I experienced their stories alongside them; my world grew as I marked essays.

One of the reasons we people-watch, I suspect, is that we are witness to mini-stories.  If we apply my own mantra--"Just be curious"--to those tiny moments, we find that we too can be imaginative storytellers for a moment or two, even if only in our own imaginations.  One of Bill's habits, which charmed me shortly after we met online, was his ability to tell humane and whimsical stories about a man driving an old car erratically down the road or a woman walking purposefully under a sun umbrella.  He has a whole troupe of "imaginary friends" whose stories he tells me while we do the dishes at night:  their travels, illnesses, friendships, jobs.  My favourite is the archeologist Dot Savage, though I also love Madge with her erratic travels and health problems she always downplays.  I haven't yet met Madge, but she's coming to town this weekend to have a Superbowl party with some of her 85-year-old friends.  It will be a hoot, Bill tells me.  More hot wings will be eaten there than anywhere else in town.  But they'll use finger bowls.

The photographs are by Veronica Geminder, whose work can be found here.

Memory and literature

What's the relationship between literature and memory?  If I simply put those two words into the U of R Archer Library's search engine, I get 461 entries.  Or to put it another way, what percentage of the books you've read in the last six months have characters who spend a lot of their time remembering?

Johanna Skibsrud's Giller-prizewinning The Sentimentalists keeps the figure of submerged memory directly in the reader's mind through the image of the lake at the edge of the small Ontario town, Casablanca, that the narrator imagines still holds, as if in a glass snow dome, the house old Henry grew up in before the area was flooded.  The narrator and her father Napoleon, both startled by the directions their lives have taken, gather at Henry's house, waiting, in some ways, for Napoleon to die.  The narrator listens to her father's memories of Vietnam and compares them after his death to the official transcript of his testimony shortly after Owen's death, and to the summers at Casablanca that have grown out of his war experience.  She finds herself amidst puzzles.  If the actual version of Owen's death  in Vietnam (Owen is Henry's son) is what Napoleon told the military court, why has Napoleon found Henry, his close friend's father, and created the powerful tie with the old man that permeates his daughters' childhoods, even in his absence?  Moreover, in the context of the drug-induced haze and the chaos that is Vietnam, what is memory?

Out Stealing Horses, a novel I wrote about in my "On Convalescence" blog, is at least half memory, as Trond recalls the summer he came of age, trying to puzzle out his father's pleasantly curt abandonment of his family.  Here, the challenge Trond faces is that no matter how precise our own memory--and Trond's is sometimes startlingly precise--there are always holes in it made by the actions and decisions of others--holes that foil Trond's attempt to fully understand himself in the present moment.  It's as if his life at sixty-seven is impearled around an absence made when he was sixteen that he can never fill.

Jane Urquhart's Sanctuary Line--which, like The Sentimentalists I had to begin rereading the minute I got to the end of it--also keeps memory to the fore.  We realize early on that scientist Liz, who studies Monarch butterflies, is telling her story to someone--a "you" that remains unnamed for most of the novel.  That story records her girlhood summers at her Uncle Stanley's farm, growing up with her cousin Mandy who has recently been killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan.  While Liz admits early on in her narrative that the sudden disappearance of her uncle and a young Mexican worker named Teo has profoundly shaped the world she now lives in, it's not until the novel's end that we learn....No spoiler alert here.  Read the novel.  At the same time, we learn that the novel's narratee is Mandy's Muslim lover Vahil; only then (and only by re-reading) do we realize that Liz is not telling the story that Vahil needs to know.  Mandy--Mandy's desires and dreams--is not at the centre of the story Liz tells him.  Liz is:  Liz, with her fond adolescent lust for Teo, with her discovery that Teo is her Uncle Stanley's child, with her reluctant conclusion that adults inhabit a world far less reliable and reasonable than the mirage they create for us when we are children, remains at the novel's centre.  So powerful is our need to narrate our memories, Urquhart suggests, that we do so at the slightest, vaguest invitation.  It's as if we think that if we tell them often enough we'll be able to finally find their meaning, their inner logic and order.

One of the things I wanted to accomplish in Blue Duets was to show how unreliable memory is as a guide to our present-day actions.  Lila realizes that, whether her memories are of her father or her early time with her husband Rob, they do not function like a hologram, making the past present so that she can watch it play out once more before her wiser, more experienced eyes that need memory's insights.  Much as she tries to allow memory to be an ethical touchstone, she must make her decisions based on her experience and perspective now.

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom....oh, no, no, no.  In spite of the fact that memory plays an important role at the novel's outset, you don't want another book report.  Having read my impressions of these books, you'd like some conclusions.  I'm not sure I have any.  I'd hazard a guess that our current-day fascination with memory begins with the modernist writers and of course with Freud.  The unconscious is memory's devil, putting it up to all kinds of unreliable things.  At the same time, my casual review of my own reading of late reveals a preoccupation with memory that doesn't seem the result of pure chance.  We could conclude that September 11th, and the recognition that all those lives enclosed  memories that are now lost, is behind our current memory-lust.  But what about the deaths of 850,000 people in Rwanda--a fifth of the country's population?  Or, of course, the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust?

I have read somewhere that in spite of the catastrophic conflicts of this century--conflicts mentioned in each of these novels on memory--throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first ideas about who deserves basic human rights became more inclusive.  This embrace of difference continues to increase first our tolerance and then our inclusion of the "other" in our social fabric.  Think of it:  women's rights, civil rights for black Americans and Canadians, gay rights.  Canada's hate speech laws are designed precisely not to allow us to fall back into the lazy thinking of intolerance where stereotypes and fear trump the recognition that each of us is human.

Each of these conflicts has left thousands dead.  That's thousands whose memories are wiped out:  for what are individuals besides their memories?  That's also thousands whom we grieve for and whom we attempt to keep human by remembering them.  But it's also thousands whose humanity we acknowledge by valuing their memories and by reading novels that emphasize the importance of memory and thus urge us to remember.

Do you see this flourishing of novels about memory?  What do you think caused it?  I'd love your comments.

The photographs here are Veronica Geminder's.  The first is taken in Boston Common on a Saturday afternoon in August.  The second is taken at Walden Pond a few days later.  The last is a photograph of Anish Kapoor's "Cloud Gate" at Millennium Park in Chicago.  I love its echoes--which remind me of memory's echo chamber:  a photographer taking a photograph of a photographer taking a photograph of himself taking a photograph.  More photographs can be found on her flickr site:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/veronica-g

Prairie Claustrophobia

The words "prairie" and "claustrophobia" probably seem oxymoronic.  What could be less claustrophobic than prairie skies that go right to the horizon?  Yet this winter, the endless snow and the white days that have no depth and make you feel like you're about to bump into an enormous stretch of white wall are claustrophobic.  Snow piles up besides the road, narrowing the streets and making it difficult to see oncoming traffic at intersections.  The snow that covers your car during every five-minute errand also piles up in ruts on the roads.  Everything seems harder than it should be:  you have to brush off your car before you can go anywhere, and probably brush it off every time you stop.  If you care about pedestrians, you shovel endlessly.

On the better days, the sun is little more than an idea, a slightly brighter haze somewhere off to the south.  On other days, you can't sense time passing:  you're caught in the eternal and cheerless present of unchanging light--creating another kind of claustrophobia, a temporal disorientation so profound that I sometimes feel in my office at the university, where my windows have been coated in gray film to keep my office cooler in summer and warmer in winter, that I work in continuous dusk.  My sense of natural time has disappeared because I can't simply look outside and know intuitively what time it is.

Saskatchewan folk have their sayings about weather--most of which are true:  ``It`s a dry cold.``  Or ``It isn`t the cold, it`s the wind.``  This uncharacteristic cloudy winter weather--an effect of climate change, perhaps, like the cool, wet springs and summers we`ve been having--is challenging our weather saws.  Now we huddle in corners and whisper together, trying to find the words that say we can cope with the cold, but are having an awful time with the cloudy days and the relentless snow.  Our spirits droop.

Then suddenly one morning we awake to the openness of cold.  It's minus 36, though there's no wind.  The nearly full moon in the west gleams over a clear sky.  As I drive just before sunrise to the university through Wascana Park to admire the growing light, the trees stretch inky blue-black against the transparent blue sky.

The next morning, the white walls are back.  There's only one thing to do:  wear my hot pink silk jacket and pretend I'm somewhere else.

Time and Being

While I was reading Heidegger's puzzling and illuminating work, Being and Time, I found myself thinking of my daughter Veronica, probably partly because I was working away at her copy and reading her notes while I made my own, but also because she's so good at being, while I am perhaps more inclined to be constantly doing. By what was probably sheer coincidence, I found us talking about being during the tea we share most Wednesday nights. As we talked, I realized that I do a better job of simply being when I'm with her. Perhaps that practice goes back to the days when she was small and it was difficult to find her shoes that were comfortable; I made the conscious decision that I could get impatient and frustrated or I could find a way to enjoy the process. The solution was to simply enjoy being until shoes were found. The habit is kept alive by the fact that we take one holiday together every year, a holiday that is one long glorious photo shoot, a holiday where I see the world very differently.

But the observation that startled me most was her assertion that she wasn't a list, but an organic whole, making me intensely jealous. Because I am definitely a list: teacher, scholar, creative writer, wife, mother, friend. The reason why my blog post mangles Heidegger's title is that time and its limitations seem constantly to be forcing me to choose which of those roles I need to play during the coming hours. Unfortunately, I suspect that during the academic year my drive to be a good teacher determines that choice, so that all the other things on the list of what I am get pushed to the side or ignored until I know I'm going to either melt or explode if I don't stop doing and start being: Then I need to take a long walk or have a meaningful conversation with Bill or Veronica over a cup of something warm and comforting, meditate with the cats, or sit and simply listen to Bruckner.

"Work/life balance" is an issue that we certainly talk about, but I think it can benefit from an admittedly simplified version of Heidegger's thoughts. For him, humanity is characterized by its reflective awareness of and curiousity about its very existence.  When we are lists of contradictory desires--I want to teach well, but I also need time to work on my next novel and there simply isn't time for me to do both of those things--how do we carve out the space to reflect on and simply delight in our being? Work/life balance isn't simply a logistical problem that we can solve by being more efficient and setting priorities, but a philosophical one. The demand that we be constantly doing and working dehumanizes us at some level.

I suspect that our children--this current generation of young adults--have learned from us that our struggle with work/life balance has often been frustrating, and have learned to do an end run around it. I wish I knew how. Certainly my work/life balance is influenced by the fact that at universities across Canada more needs to be done with less. So I can, as I promised in my New Year's Resolutions, rebel against some of the expectations that I believe are unreasonable or even fruitless, and carve out a little more time to be.

But it's also that I want so much, am simply hungry for so much. It may be too late for me to learn to want less. There are two novels I want to write and half a dozen quilts I want to make. Don't even ask me about the notes I've made for poems or my sock yarn stash. Perhaps what I need is a different attitude toward time. That it must be respected with a certain amount of careful being inside of it.

It's interesting that Veronica's and my chosen art forms have a different relationship to time. As a photographer, she captures a split second, though I think the power of her photographs comes from her ability to frame the right split second that resonates through time--both forward and backward. There's a history to the passionate conversation she's caught in the photograph above, taken outside one of the posh shopping malls in Boston on one of our vacations, and there's a future in the young man's daydreams. My medium is language and narrative, which can only unfold in time.

You can see more of Veronica's photographs of Boston on her Flickr site. She tells me her wonderful photographs of our trip to Chicago will be up soon.

On the Road Revisited

The blustery snowy weather today reminded me that when nature is beautiful, it is often treacherous, and prompted me to revisit and revise a poem I began during the drive home from a reading at McNally Robinson in Saskatoon mid-November.  That day, the wind came from the east, and on the part of Highway 11 that runs parallel to the valley, snow seemed to rush up out of the earth and sweep onto the road.

The east wind can't quite muster
a white-out, but smudges rows of scrub,
fetches up in the clefts of coulees,
takes an eraser to the horizon,
wraps the sun and the measure of hours in white silk.

Fourteen thousands years ago, retreating glaciers cut
the sediment that ice and time
had already left behind,
engraving a scrawl of coulees down
the carved spine.  Today
the wind cuts along the valley's eastern edge,
the snow gets caught up in the cleft, pops the western ledge
like a snowboarder,
wipes out on the road.

You can't take in this landscape with your eye.  It wants
your hand to caress its crests and eddies, your hand
to fetch up against the sudden line of trees, to read
the braille of bole and branch, to name the grasses
in the whitened dark, to trace the ramification
of coulee, to finger the brush and scrub and grass.  You need to search
with frozen fingers along the shaft of vetch, down to tease
the beaded tracks of meadow vole and pocket mouse,
to find the tuft of fur
surrounding spring like a frozen shell.

New Year's Resolutions

In a simplistic mood, it's easy to divide people into two groups.  There are the introverts and the extroverts.  There are what I call "yes" people and "no" people:  people who say yes to life's wayward invitations and people who politely decline.  There are also people who make resolutions--like me, and people who don't-- like my husband Bill and my daughter.  It's true that the New Year is an arbitrary marker for resolving to live differently.  My daughter, Veronica, sensibly says "If it's not broken, don't fix it.  If it's broken, don't wait until January first to fix it."  While this makes sense to me, I like the arbitrariness of it; in the midst of holiday busy-ness, the invitation to reflect is welcome. 

This year two of my resolutions are rebellions.  First, I'm going to rebel against a culture that's become obsessed with speed, perhaps because many of us begin our day wishing that our computer would boot up more quickly.  In a social context, I see this obsession most frequently on the roads and in public spaces like shopping malls where we really don't care whether we cut off the little old lady with the walker--after all, she's too slow for modern life anyway--because we've got to save thirty seconds.  I'm also going to be a cooperative driver, trying to make the roads a little more civil.  After all, why does moving through one's day need to become some kind of Darwinian test?

Along with my friend Jeanne Shami, I'm going to try to spend more time pursuing my own purposes--teaching and writing, nurturing my family and friends, knitting and quilting--rather than reacting to institutional and social pressures which often turn out to be false alarms.  I'm chosing this rebellion because I think society as a whole has become too reactive--answering voicemail, email, texts, rather than being driven by purposes that we've thought about and believe to be good.

I'm going to give up multi-tasking.  My friend and psychologist Katherine Arbuthnott says we don't multi-task very well as a species.  Research also suggests that the people who multi-task most do it the worst.  My version of multi-tasking usually involves doing one thing while worrying about not having time to do the next 5 things.  I'll think about my priorities (while my computer is booting up and installing updates), make myself a list and just get on with doing the first thing on that list.

This fall was a frantic, sleepless nightmare.  I need to return to living with joy and purpose.  In the winter term, I want my students to write better, to think more critically about the historical moment and its relationship to literature, culture and society.   What better, more joyful way to spend one's time?

My, my.  I do sound like an old fart, don't I?  Sometimes it's important, though, to embrace your inner old fart and resist a culture's unthinking reactions to circumstances, many of which are created by the available technology or someone else's priorities.

Then when my sabbatical begins this summer, I'll make a whole new set of resolutions.  Who needs to wait for January?