Mindful Sundays

When I was a kid, my poor father complained about never getting enough sports.  The three women in his family would whine "Do we have to watch this?" unless the University of Michigan was playing in the Rose Bowl.  Now I love football Sundays.  Bill, who retains his loyalty to the Blue Bombers from his Winnipeg days, wanted to spend the afternoon watching the two semi-final games for the Grey Cup.  Now of course he's in a great mood, thinking about how Winnipeg is going to "whup" BC next weekend, though he's also a little nervous about the home team advantage.

But what I love about football Sundays is the opportunity to go guiltlessly to my workroom and spend time reading and working on quilts.  Today I was trying to get the blocks for the bluegreygreen quilt into rows that I could then "marry," as my mother used to call it, before I created a border of blocks turned on point.  I'm about half done.  As I pieced, I watched the sun move across the floor.  Sheba, who has her spot at the narrow end of the ironing board, supervised while Twig slept on the end of the bed.  I'd take breaks reading Frances Itani's Requiem or practicing the guitar.  Time stretched like a lazy cat in the meditative space I created.

Matching up those tiny triangles at the corner of the blocks kept my fingers busy, allowing my mind to drift over my thoughts about Requiem:  about how I'd have liked the narrator's voice to be less formal and more visual, but how important and touching the story is.  Bin Okuma seems to lose everything three times over:  first when his family is rounded up and interned in the interior of British Columbia.  Not only is their house and fishing boat taken, but the family is charged for towing the boat to the Navy yard.  The community they belong to on the Fraser River finds ways to house themselves and earn money growing tomatoes and keeping gardens.  While the outhouses continue to be terrifying for Bin, the community does manage to create bath houses and root cellars.  His second loss occurs on the happiest day of his life, a day when his father has put aside his characteristic anger about Bin's dreaminess.  We learn this is only because Bin is being given away to an elderly widower who has no children.  Though growing up in Okuma-san's household is much more peaceful, although his new father manages to find paper so he can draw, Bin's anger at being given away coexists right beside his gratitutde for Okuma-san's generosity and patience, for the introduction to art and music that he experiences in his home.  Finally, the loss that precipitates the "road trip" story that holds the novel together is the death of his wife Lena.  Requiem is a story that repays thought while you fingers feel the seams to make sure they're meeting in just the right way:  a story about loss, about the redemption of art anbd music, about the difficulty of letting go, about home and the various kinds of homelessness, about what our culture does to those who are different.

Perhaps it's ironic, but I also spent quite a lot of that time thinking about the future of the Occupy movement.  What could be more representative of home, besides bread or soup, than a quilt?  And what could be more "un-home-like" than living out of a tent in a public space and asking whether our society really does what it  can to make everyone feel at home?  And what could make them feel less like an integral part of the fabric of society than to have the police move in and put eviction notices on their tents--when they weren't taking them down and putting them in the trash?

I'm hopeful that the Occupyers will find other ways to help their ideas remain visible; some groups seem to already have spent time thinking about how they'll cope with this expected outcome.  Yet in this time of tweets and sound bites, our attention span is ridiculously short:  if the media doesn't keep its ear to the ground about what this group is thinking, the momentum will be lost, and I'm afraid the media doesn't care a lot about what's not in our face.  But at the same time, this idea that can't be evicted tells us that we have to change our way of thinking.  Even if they continued to live in their tents, the change has to be supported by those of us who vote.

First, we have to stop thinking about taxes as a dirty word.  They are, rather, the cost of our collective well-being.  Some of the most highly-taxed societies in the world, like Norway, also have the greatest sense of well-being, which is another way of suggesting that individual wealth and success shouldn't perhaps be the most important item on our agendas.

We have to stop thinking of leadership as what you do or don't do in order to get re-elected four years from now.  Leadership requires long-term thinking and a willingness to take some risks for the collective good.  Yet we continue to elect governments based on immediate promises (often for no new taxes) rather than long-term vision.

While capitalism seems to be the best system human beings have created, it's far from perfect, particularly in the current form that emphasizes the individual's success and the individual's needs and desires.  So we're really going to need to re-think the relationship between individual desires and society's well-being.  Interestingly, Requiem has some sense of what that might be like: a group of sixty families in shacks backed up against a mountain managed to have enough to eat and continued the education of their children even under very difficult circumstances.  Minimalism helps you figure out your priorities, whether you're in an Occupy camp or unjustly interned in the middle of nowhere. 



On another note altogether, people have been asking whether there will be something akin to a Ken Probert Scholarship.  To answer that question, I'm simply going to paste in an email from the English Department Head, Nick Ruddick:

Before his death, Ken Probert gave $10,000 to the U of R towards a new English Dept. scholarship. This gift will now be used to create the Dr. Ken Probert Memorial Scholarship, with the English Dept. itself to decide the scholarship criteria. The current fundraising target for this scholarship is $5,000. This amount, added to Ken’s gift and with all funds then matched by the University, will generate a scholarship of $1,200 per year.

Further information about how we might help achieve the fundraising goal is now available in the Dept’s main office. Please do pass on the news about the scholarship to Ken’s former colleagues and students.


The Department's phone number is 585-4320.

Ken Probert

Yesterday was Ken Probert's funeral.  That the Speers Funeral Chapel was full; that the groups represented included a large family (the men wearing brightly-coloured Converse sneakers), many U of R faculty and students, Moose Javians, the Regina writing community, and old time friends and drinking buddies; that the word "generous" was on many people's lips, but that we also said there were parts of his life that eluded us--speaks of his complexity and of a largeness in his life that I don't think he entirely recognized or believed in.

Nick Ruddick came the closest to admitting the mystery of Ken when he said that although Ken regularly dropped the Sunday New York Times or a bag full of New Yorkers on his front porch, although they were hired at the same time after spending a year teaching together at the University of Manitoba, although they worked together for 28 years, Nick didn't know Ken particularly well.  Nick read "regrets" from people like Joan Givner, who remembered Ken's skills in the kitchen and his great recipe collection, and from Bela Szabados, who talked of what it was like to work with Ken on a collection of essays and of the myriad kinds of intelligence he brought to that task.  A former student who became a close friend, Rebecca Gibbons, spoke of Ken's generosity and insight as a professor.  Ken's U of S roommate, Rob Pletch, talked of their post-B.A. days seeing the world together, sharing the fact that Ken had spent two weeks in a cave in Crete--something I certainly never knew. Rob also talked about how Ken would throw himself into projects at Rob's Kenosee Lake cottage, but that he was also ready with a critique of the project--something that seemed more like Ken.  So we glimpsed, in the former part of our celebration of his life:  Ken the encouraging presence for creative writers; Ken the colleague who always knew what one was interested in and brought books, titles, newspapers to your door;  Ken the cook; Ken the editor; Ken the guy's guy who liked football, sailing, projects at the lake.

When Ken retired in 2010, I was asked at the last minute to speak; this was no stretch because I'd long had two favourite Ken Probert stories.  One involved a graduate student of Michael Trussler's who needed an emergency loan for a hearing test.  Ken took $100 out of his wallet, handed it to Michael, and said "I don't want this back, and I don't want anyone to know where it came from."  This was vintage Ken:  the generosity and the self-effacing humility.  The other was frankly autobiographical, but describes an important facet of Ken's personality.  I walked into his office one day and said--not very articulately--"Ken, I can't do this."  Ken closed his door, seated me in his comfy chair, and said "Kathleen, you have to stop trying to be so perfect."  In spite of not giving him much to go in with my cri de coeur, Ken knew exactly what needed saying.  I think Ken frequently knew how it was with us, his colleagues and his students.  For some reason I can only guess about, he didn't want us to know how it was with him.

Ken loved beauty.  In spite of his colour-blindness, it was clear from his conversation that he knew the great works of art and the role their iconography played in our cultural lives.  He loved music passionately and with a catholic taste I hope to be able to emulate when I'm eighty.  (I'll need the next twenty years to work on it.)  He loved Bach's music in particular, especially the Cantatas, and phone calls from Ken were often accompanied by the gorgeous sound of his carefully-constructed stereo system.  He could suss out the beauty from a line of Yeats or Eliot; he grasped and revelled in the beauty of Henry James's thick and complex world view.  He loved the contemporary world of ideas; so frequently a Saturday or Sunday phone call came from Ken telling me about a Canadian author who was being interviewed on CBC Radio.  And I think he simply loved having all this at his fingertips.  Rob spoke of Ken's pipe--an early affectation perhaps, for the man of culture?  Yet Rob was right:  he was never arrogant or elitist about what he knew. 

I've known about Ken's death for five days now, and I still can't take it in.  It saddens me enormously, often when I'm in the kitchen doing something absolutely pedestrian like chopping vegetables with one of the several knives he gave me and think that Ken will never again be part of the beautiful, magical dailiness of life that is sometimes a matter of getting by and sometimes a celebration. At the end of her collection of poems, Men in the Off Hours, Anne Carson writes of thinking about her mother's death at the same time she's looking at some Virginia Woolf manuscripts that have Woolf's cross-outs and revisions.  Carson writes

"Reading this, especially the cross-out line, fills me with a sudden understanding.  Crossouts are something you rarely see in published texts.  They are like death:  by a simple stroke--all is lost, yet still there.  For death although utterly unlike life shares a skin with it.  Death lines every moment of ordinary time.  Death hides right inside every shining sentence we grasped and had no grasp of.  Death is a fact....Crossouts sustain me now.  I search out and cherish them like old photographs of my mother in happier times.  It may be a stage of grieving that will pass.  It may be that I'll never again think of sentences unshadowed in this way.  It has changed me."

Perhaps Ken had insight into my moment of angst because he was also hard on himself.  Yet I've told the story of his comforting words to several graduate students who have gotten to that point in their writing where they're convinced they have nothing important to say.  The story almost always brings first tears and then relief.  Our stories about Ken will remain the crossed-out words that are sustaining.  Please add your own stories here if you wish.

I called the Saskatchewan Writers Guild on Thursday to see if they had any photographs of Ken hosting one of the many reading series, offering introductions that were insightful, quirky, and always always generous.  They could only give me a photograph to "publish" on my blog if they knew who had taken it, and this came down to the very dated photo you see above.  Ken was the host of the Signature Reading Series at the MacKenzie Art Gallery.  I had been here only a year and was reading from my first book of poetry.  I remember him saying that I already had a reputation as a fine teacher--words that encouraged me in some of the dicey moments we all have in the classroom.  The other people are Rosemary Sullivan and Brenda Riches, who also died far too young, on the left.  The photograph was taken by Christiane Laucht Hilderman in 1991.

Jamie Parker at St. Cecelia

We have water in the basement again.  I inherited a rented water heater when I moved to Regina in 1990, and was told it was a good idea:  that our hard water was hard on water heaters.  It had begun to look alarmingly rusty about a year ago, and I talked to the company about this, but they told me that as long as they continued to service it, it would be fine.  Skeptical, but also wanting a more energy-efficient furnace and water heater, I decided about six weeks ago to go through the environmental audit in preparation for new ones.  I will get a new furnace and water heater tomorrow.  Which is, of course, why the old water heater started leaking yesterday.  We had quite a mess before we even discovered it, and spent yesterday (and last night, taking it in turns) emptying every hour the only thing that would fit under the water heater and catch the drips:  a 9 X 13 baking pan.

Which is why we threw caution to the winds last night and went to hear pianist Jamie Parker, who was playing in the new St. Cecelia series.  We came back to a small lake, but it was worth it.

As you have doubtless figured out, I have some strange habits.  One is to go to concerts of course for the music, but also to people watch.  I'm curious about what people take away from concerts.  These concerts are scheduled for 7 p.m. on Sunday night, which is perhaps one of the reason there were so many relatively young kids there, as well as quite a few adolescents.  It was charming to listen to young beefy men and willowy girls with their long hair on top of their head talk about the repertoire they were working on, and how close they were getting to nailing it  It was moving to watch the five-year-olds melt into their mothers' arms and listen sleepily, or even stand up and move in time to Parker's wilder choices.  But mostly I'm simply curious about how we respond to something as mathematically abstract as the 12 notes of our octave.  I blame Diane Ackerman for this.  Thinking about whale song in her gorgeous essay "Moon by Whale Light," she considered the mystery of whales' need to sing in a rather metaphysical way.  Whales have huge brains, and brains take a lot of energy, so what are they doing with them? Here's my favourite quotation about consciousness:

"After all, mind is such an odd predicament for matter to get into.  I often marvel how something like hydrogen, the simplest atom, forged in some early chaos of the universe, could lead to us and the gorgeous fever we call consciousness.  If a mind is just a few pounds of blood, dream, and electric, how does it manage to contemplate itself, worry about its soul, do time-and-motion studies, admire the shy hooves of a goat, know that it will die, enjoy all the grand and lesser mayhems of the heart?  What is mind, that one can be out of one's?  How can a neuron feel compassion?  What is a self?  Why did automatic, hand-me-down mammals like our ancestors somehow evolve brains with the ability to consider, imagine, project, compare, abstract, think of the future?  If our experience of mind is really just the simmering of an easily alterable chemical stew, then what does it mean to know something, to want something, to be?  How do you begin with hydrogen and end up with prom dresses, jealousy, chamber music?  What is music that it can satisfy such a mind, and even perhaps function as a language?"

Our love of music is physical.  When I was at Banff, working on that grand piano, I remembered the physical pleasure of  playing relatively simple things on a wonderful instrument.  (I need to get my own piano tuned.)  What I love about the guitar is holding it up against my body, so the sound resonates throughout me, as well as in the air around me.  But there are still a couple of mysteries.  Why does Brahms speak to my body, while Bill Evans or U2 speak to yours?  How are these languages our bodies and minds translate?  I'm sure some of it is almost universal.  Give a piece of music a driving beat, whether it's the line of a bass guitar or octaves in a classical pianist's left hand, and we all have the same urge to move.  Some of it is surely cultural.  You know that it's way more hip to listen to Lady Gaga than to Debussy; to some degree your taste is shaped by the musical culture around you.  Yet how can I, the classical nerd par excellence, know that a song by Arcade Fire or Moonalice is fabulous?

Jamie Parker confessed to being a night owl.  He usually practices, he told us, between 9 p.m., when he puts the kids to bed, and 3 a.m.  Then he takes the dogs for a walk.  So appropriately he'd given us a program of music associated with the night:  from Schubert's Traumerei or "Dreams" to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, whose presto he played at breakneck speed--letting the dogs out, he called it.  This thematic approach allowed him to play some things we wouldn't hear on the standard "two sonatas" program, including some I can actually play, like the Brahms Opus 118 "Intermezzo."  So he clearly wasn't going for a program that would impress us, but rather one that allowed us varied occasions for reflection, thought, and daydreaming of our own.  He played each piece as if it was a gem that deserved all of his musical, thoughtful attention and every tonal colour the piano could provide.   His informal program notes were in turns informative, touching, and playful.  At one point, he even made the sound of a Hungarian frog Bartok refers to in his "The Night's Music" from his "Out of Doors Suite."  There was lots of solid information about how the music worked, but also confessions about how the music had moved him.  It was worth the lake when we got home, and gave us a much needed balm, a reminder of the way beauty and art can sustain us and are really more important and much more enduring than relatively unimportant inconveniences (in the grand scheme of things) like water in the basement.

So I'm thinking about Ackerman's whales again.  Somehow scientists have concluded that there's information in whalesong, though we haven't been able to decode it.  Perhaps the whales are more interested, though, in soothing or expressing; maybe this is a whale's version of a purr of satisfaction over tasty plankton or a slipstream of water that strokes them in a pleasurable way.  Maybe they're waiting for the water cooler to arrive.

Play

What do Halloween, the World's Series, my cat Sheba and art critic Dave Hickey have in common?









A celebration of play, of playfulness.  Play, particularly play that is purposeful and rule-bound, is often thought of as one of the things that makes humans different from the rest of the animals, but two of my cats, Sheba and Ivy,  have both challenged this idea.  Each of them created "rules" for their play that made it more challenging.  Sheba's idea of a good time is to bring me one of her crinkly mylar balls, drop it at my feet, and go stand in front of one of the chairs in the living room.  The rule is this:  when I throw the ball, she'll be standing on the floor.  But by the time the ball is over the chair, she'll be in it and will bat the ball off somewhere else that makes it interesting to scuttle and chase.

Even if we're not cats, we need to play.  Play allows us to make things complicated, to ask "what if?" to stir things up a little, even to translate one inexpressible perception or feeling into another that comes closer to expression.  Play seems to be very close to both art and craft.  In fact, the kind of play we do may determine whether we're working in the arts or the crafts.  The crafters will kill me (but leave a comment below before you do), but I'd say the play of craft is more whimsical and less risky.  It doesn't take itself terribly seriously.  You can knit socks for sign posts, or cover a bus in knitted graffiti without saying anything in particular, or with the intent of leaving a trenchant message.  "Content" isn't a big deal; meaning is even less than a big deal.  Just have fun, and leave a trace of that sense of fun on the world.  Google "guerilla knitting" and see how much fun people are having.  Some of the fun has meaning, but it doesn't worry about meaning.

Of course, Halloween costumes (given that mothers don't always have time and expertise) lean toward the commercial:  there are Supermen and Spidermen and the easy ghost. But my colleague Medrie is an ace seamstress and her son Rowan has an outside-the-box imagination, so he was a Jedi-Triceratops.  That is, he had a wonderful dinosaur costume but also carried a light sabre.  Apparently the original "guising" or wearing of costumes stems from a time when it was believed that souls wandered the earth, some of them seeking vengeance, until All Souls' Day.  The living dressed up so they wouldn't be recognized by the vengeful (not the Grateful) dead.  I'm having trouble following the line from this Sixteenth-century practice and a kid in a triceratops costume, but maybe I'm not being playful enough.  Perhaps one affirmation of life is play.

What is certain is that even as adults we need to play.  In a walk down Thirteenth Avenue on Tuesday (my brain, exhausted with aesthetics, was offline, so I needed to walk), I stopped into Paper Umbrella, a place that encourages play in wonderful ways.  The little easel by the desk had a notice about a Saskatchewan Bookbinders and Book Artists' event, so we talked casually about how much people need to be creative and playful.  He told me that there are quite a number of groups that meet to encourage play, one of them devoted entirely to paper.  Trying to find information on the bookbinders' event, I ran into another one also occurring this weekend.  So you can take your pick and go to the True Knit Art Show 3:  Craftermath  on this weekend at the Riddell Centre, offering us "renegade art and craft from great local artists."  On the same day, the Saskatchewan chapter of the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists' Guild will have a show of hundreds of handmade books at 42 McMaster Place between 1 and 4.

The quilt at the top of the post is called "Sunflowers in the Night Garden."  It was made for my wonderful sister-in-law, Gloria, who has this thing for sunflowers.  But of course play, as Rowen well knows, involves doing something differently; it's a kind of jazz riff on the world of appearances, the world of stereotypes and cliches.  So I couldn't just make Gloria a quilt that looked like real sunflowers, straining, as they always do, toward the sun;  I wanted to think about sunflowers at night.  And instead of trying to make fabric look like real sunflowers, I used a traditional Mariner's Compass pattern to simply suggest sunflowers.  Your eyes have to play a little bit as you look.

This is one of my more recent "what if?" quilts.  The pattern is a conventional "log cabin," which usually begins with a red square in the middle and then builds up the block in strips of light or dark fabric.  As the name suggests, it's a very North American design, most often made in bright calicoes.  But what would happen if I combined the American design with the softness of Japanese fabrics? 






In a recent post, I tried to wax eloquent about the fall colours I was seeing.  I even tried taking photographs, but they were, as photographs, too washed out.  So I asked another "what if?" question.   What if I used an American block in a really small scale (the round object is my thimble, so you can see how small the pieces are), along with the soft colours of Japanese fabrics to explore the way you need to see the landscape this time of year?

 

In his essay, "Frivolity and Unction" (I almost typed that "fun/ction") Dave Hickey talks about a 60 Minutes episode where Morley Safer takes on the pretentiousness of the art world in a Sotheby's auction room.   Apparently Safer's critique was way off base, entirely uninformed, and created quite a righteous stir in the art world.  He queried things like the "emotive content" of abstract art.  But Hickey was okay with it.  In fact, he thinks the art world might be better off if it were a bit more playful.  "We could just say:  'Okay!  You're right!  Art is bad, silly, and frivolous.  So what?  Rock-and-roll is bad, silly, and frivolous.  Movies are bad, silly, and frivolous.  Basketball is bad, silly, and frivolous.  Next question'?"  He thinks that if we take art off its pedestal, next to other things we value, we could talk about it a little more vigorously, a little more adventurously.  It art isn't on a pedestal, we don't need to be qualified specialists to talk about it.  Might that not get a more democratic, more playful conversation about art going?

I took the photograph of that wonderful horse at the Minneapolis Institute of Art this summer. 

Happiness and the Good Life 2: Community

On Saturday mornings, Bill and I begin our day by going out for coffee; sometimes we go to Good Earth in the Scarth Street Mall.  This last Saturday, the view was slightly surreal.  The tall homeless man (I'm making a presumption--and no, that's not a slip of the fingers) who stands silently at the corner of 12th and Scarth was there, and we talked about the weather, as we often do, while I dug around for my small contribution to his life.  Across the way, in Victoria Park, were the tents of Occupy Regina, still mostly peaceful.  I imagined what it would be like to wake up on a crisp October morning surrounded by people who shared your passion, your vision, standing around drinking coffee, talking about what mattered.  In my nostalgic haze, I hadn't thought where the hot coffee might come from.

Nostalgic it was:  because if I thought about the last time I felt embraced in such a community, it would be my early years in the English Department at the University of Regina, when we all taught four courses a year (instead of five every other year) and did far less committee work.  Wednesday mornings--because nobody taught on Wednesday--we often gathered in the Faculty Lounge and talked about what mattered:  students, texts, approaches to literature.   We created a community, and is so often the case, that community was created by our response to literature--to art.  Stretching back as far as Kant, the "judgement of taste" as he would have put it, assumed that other people might share your opinion, but that no one needed to.  More recently, in Dennis Donaghue's book Speaking of Beauty, he talks about the fact that a definition of beauty eludes us, so we must talk about it.  In Dave Hickey's Air Guitar, which I've been reading for my work on Virginia Woolf's aesthetics (an odd pairing if ever there was one:  Hickey loves Las Vegas, the one place in the States where he feels at home, and once dealt in psychedelic art), he talks about the feeling that you have when you have read a poem or a story, or have been to a movie or a gallery show, and you say to other people "You've got to see/read/hear this!"  This response makes Woolf and Hickey logical bedfellows, in spite of their obvious differences.  For what else is Woolf's two-volume The Common Reader but an attempt to create a community of readers?  When she heard that the copy of TCR in the Lewes library was spotted and splotched with food, she was delighted.  She had indeed reached common readers.

In the same essay, Dave Hickey told another story about community which entirely charmed me--again, with a sense of nostalgia.  Because he grew up in the fifties, when people kept their windows open during the summer, his father learned that the Jewish woman down the street who had survived the Holocaust shared a passion of his.  Simply put, on summer nights he could hear her playing Duke Ellington 78s.  This led to an extraordinary Sunday afternoon jam session, with Mildred, Hickey and his father and two other Irish dudes, two Latinos, and two blacks toking up and making music.  Unlike the others, Mildred brought an armload of sheet music, and when Hickey whispered about this derisively to his father, his dad told him to shut up.  The more experienced jammers made room for Mildred that afternoon, encouraging her to "take it," and giving her the usual 16-bar space for a solo that never came.  But they never stopped making space for her.  Who knew when she might finally feel enough courage?

This is a fairly long riff on my part, as it moves from my Saturday morning thoughts about community, to nostalgic memories of my early years in Regina, to an aesthetics of community and a 1950s slightly stoned jam session.  But as it turns out, it comes right back to where it began.  Yesterday afternoon I bought some cookies and muffins and went to hang out with the folks who are occupying Regina.  On the basis of 25 minutes of uneasy conversation between an English professor and a couple of guys, I'm not going to make any generalizations about the people who are occupying Regina with their signs that range from telling me not to trip over tent ropes (which I promptly proceeded to do), to assertions that "In Squirrel We Trust" or "This is Democracy in Action."  Interestingly, I talked to quite a number of people who are not occupying Regina, but who came there simply to hang.  One young man said sadly that if his wife would simply let him off his leash, he'd move in tomorrow.  Another young man had brought his kids. 

But Gerry (not his name), whom I talked to longest, said that the response to their occupation has been pretty good.  They have their whiteboard up with things they need, and people often read it, go away and clean out their closets, and then return with needed blankets or sleeping bags.  Gerry often keeps night watch, however, because when O'Hanlons gets out, they can find dudes pissing on their tents.  But a supportive retired couple drove in last week from Fort Qu'Appelle with enormous pans of ham and other hot food.  And apparently there were lots of leftovers from a Knox Met pot luck or fowl supper that got brought over to the group of tents.

There have been complaints that the aims of the "Occupy" movement are unfocussed.  I don't agree.  I think they're critiquing a capitalist system that's way out of tune, and I think they're worried about what we're doing to the planet--since changing our approach to the environment would (shock and awe) cost money (which we could take out of absurd CEO salaries).  But what I saw and heard yesterday, and the daydreams that the quiet collection of tents started in my head was the dream of community.  We could say this about the "Occupy" movement:  that in the place of an excessively competitive capitalism that divides winners and losers pretty ruthlessly, they're offering us a vision of community.  They clean up their park; they chant the words of the people who come to inspire them, they move their tents every couple of days so they don't kill the grass.  In his essay "What is the Good Life?" Mark Kingwell writes "We are, finally, happier not with more stuff but with more meaning:  more creative leisure time, stronger connections to groups of friends, deeper commitment to common social projects, and a great opportunity to reflect.  In short, the life of the well-rounded person, including crucially the orienting aspect of life associated with virtuous citizenship.  Nor is this basic social commitment something we should pursue for ourselves alone, a project simply to promote our personal happiness.  At its best, it is an expression of commonality that creates something greater than the sum of its--let us be honest--often self-interested and distracted members.  It creates a community."

On Happiness and the Good Life

My friend Katherine Arbuthnott has told me that psychologists have come at happiness from a number of angles, using different methods or making different assumptions, and have generally come to the same conclusions.  If you have extrinsic motivations--if you think that money or status or beauty will make you happy--you're screwed.  Because, simply put, there's never enough money or success. We know what happens to beauty.  On the other hand, if your goals are intrinsic, rising out of what gives you pleasure and joy, or out of ideals you have about the human condition or relationships between people--things that can't be seen by anyone but you, you don't need a lot of the money or status to be quite happy.  In one study, for example, a kind of bachelor's degree exit questionnaire established whether students' goals were intrinsic or extrinsic and then asked the students to say what they'd like to have achieved at the end of the next several years.  Interestingly, in their follow-up interviews, the psychologists found most students had met their goals.  Only the students with intrinsic motivation, however, were satisfied with their accomplishments and had an increased sense of well-being.

A few months ago, Bill and I watched a fascinating documentary on happiness.  Here's a clue:  it isn't winning the lottery.  When lottery winners were interviewed, they talked about the attempts to be happy in spite of the money.  Perhaps Violet and Allan Large of Lower Truro near Halifax have figured how to be happy with a lottery win:  give it away to people who need it.  Even with a five-year-old truck and a thirteen-year-old car, they have all they need--each other.  Here's another clue:  it doesn't mean you haven't suffered in some profound way.  Men who had been prisoners of war reported that if they could live their lives over, they wouldn't try to avoid those difficult times because they made them who they are.

But through this entire program, I kept asking a question that no one would answer.  Why is happiness the greatest good?  Even the economists have begun to use their mathematical models to consider happiness, mostly because they realize that GDP doesn't measure the well-being of a society.  As I understand the research, one of the things they've discovered is that I'm happy with my salary if it's more than yours.  If it's less--even if that "less" is a lot--I'm not entirely satisfied.

What makes me happy?  A good day's writing.  A great class where the students have had an "aha!" moment or have taught me something.  Meaningful conversation with Bill or Veronica or a close friend.  A cat on my lap.  Filling the bird feeders on these crisp mornings and listening to the eager birds waiting in the trees for breakfast.  A beautiful day--preferably not windy.  Saying 'thank you' to someone and surprising them.  What I'm trying to work out for myself, on my own terms, is the relationship between being happy and what the Greek philosophers (and many philosophers since) have called living the good life.

To some extent I saw this problem played out in two books I read earlier this fall.  The first was Sheila Heti's well-reviewed How Should a Person Be?  The passive verb "be" made me slightly nervous, as did the narrator's focus, often to the detriment of the people around her, on how she should present herself to the world. I wasn't nearly as fond of the book as the reviewers were (though to be fair, I've included a link to the good reviews below), because ironized or not, the ethical dilemmas faced by our Sheila-narrator seemed banal and fairly unchallenging and not a little self-involved.  There's a certain picaresque energy about Sheila's quest for meaning in her life and success as an artist, and certainly a Facebooky-texty edginess to the style. But for me, this didn't make up for the banality or sheer triviality of the narrator's anxieties and behaviour.

Let's contrast that with Diane Ackerman's plangent One Hundred Names for Love.  This work of creative non-fiction records the aftermath of a massive stroke for Ackerman's husband, writer Paul West.  The result was aphasia--sometimes an erasure, sometimes a tangling of language in West's damaged brain.  Ackerman, who has written extensively about science and recently about the brain, clearly explains what Paul is experiencing, explains the challenges his faces, the way his brain mis-fires, so that he often finds no words at all, sometimes can only create fey quasi-metaphors that need to be decoded.  The typical boring, repetitive strategies for bringing language back online don't work for the imaginative West, but Ackerman's encouragement to go ahead and be playful and offbeat does, producing the one hundred names of the book's title. While watching West's slow return to language is inspiring--he wrote three books after the stroke-- perhaps most moving for me was Ackerman's attempt to give him the best care she could at home while continuing to take care of her own creative and emotional needs.  This narrative doesn't consider what it's good to "be," but about what it's important to do, and how difficult making those decisions is when your own needs and those of someone you love are in conflict.  

As I go back to my question about the relationship between happiness and the good life via my thoughts about these books, I may have a hypothesis.  Extrinsic motivation involves being something:  being rich or being beautiful.  Intrinsic motivation involves doing something, and that something often involves creativity, kindness, justice, craftsmanship, conversation.

These questions about being and doing are given more relevance right now by the various "Occupy" movements we see occurring across Europe and North America.  In some ways, we're looking at the effects that the insatiable people with extrinsic goals have on the lives of people who are trying to find enough resources to simply live.  When I got all lofty this weekend about the benefits of intrinsic motivation, Bill asked quite pointedly whether that mattered to someone who was simply looking for enough money to pay rent and utilities and buy groceries.  Probably not:  it's something my privileged status allows me to think about in my spare time.  All the same, as Katherine Arbuthnott wisely observed last week, the more our culture spends its time observing and considering the lives of the rich and famous, the more time we as a culture spend thinking about a kind of motivation that isn't really good for any of us.

Here's the link to the reviews of How Should a Person Be?
http://www.sheilaheti.net/hsapb-reviews.html

Undefinable beauty

Being on sabbatical is making me a boring blogger. When I'm not reading aesthetics or Woolf criticism, I'm walking in the woods or making big dinners.  I don't have the delight of students challenging me and teaching me new things, forcing me to go in new directions.  In fact, the very point of this sabbatical, from one perspective, is to finally express what I know and have been thinking about Woolf on and off for the last six years.  Fortunately--and this probably speaks to what I love about Woolf and about literature and art more generally--that task is always going to be full of surprises, twists, and turns.  

Also fortunately, there's sometimes a delightful consonance between walking in the woods and reading aesthetics.

I love this time of year on the prairie.  When it's full summer, the world in Regina is an explosion of green punctuated by people's gardens, but I think in the main we feel delightfully enveloped by some whole, large impression of a world in the thick of fecundity.  Being in love with prairie autumns is to have your attention captured differently.  Mostly, I notice detail.  The texture of dried grass punctuated by enthusiastic weeds that have invented playful and effective ways of scattering their seeds.  Or the texture of a pile of leaves that has fallen, brown and sere, in arabesques and curlicues. The architecture of trees as they reveal themselves to me day by day.  Colour.  Colours that can't be captured by a single word, that make you concentrate to express what you see.  Much of the green has gone greeny-gold.  Or olive-greeny-gold.  We're suddenly aware of brown, but aware of how many shades--from the greybrown of bark to the redbrown of those weeds you see at the side of the road, to the goldbrown of fallen aspen leaves.

Bill and I drove out the old Lumsden Road yesterday, and the fields were the colour of creamed honey, except that describing it that way gets the texture all wrong.  It's not silky, like creamed honey; it's more like an inventively-combed brush cut.  There's one place on the road where I made Bill stop because the farmers, who are on one of the Qu'Appelle Valley tributaries, have had to be very creative ploughing their fields to both get the most crop and go with the flow of the land.  In some ways, it looks like the raked sand of a Japanese garden, but that texture isn't right either.  It just is itself.

I was delighted today, then, when I was reading Alexander Nehemas's Only a Promise of Happiness (which is how Stendahl defined beauty), to come across his sense that beauty always eludes us.  That's part of what makes it beauty:  "The problem is with the idea that we already know the features that account for the beauty of the object before us, which doesn't acknowledge the fact that as long as we find something beautiful we feel certain that it can still yield something of value, despite the fact that we don't know what that is....Just as nothing we know is enough to prove that something is beautiful, everything we love is always a step beyond our understanding.  The pleasures of the imagination are pleasures of anticipation, not accomplishment" (75-6).  We love a poem for its unending complexity that no reading ever captures.  We love a beautiful child for a million reasons, but one of these is for the child's sense of potential, of becoming someone who surprises us, often daily.  We love a painting, whether it's a Mark Rothko or a Vermeer or a Kenojuak owl because we can never exhaust the delight we take in the image, can never exhaust a sense of significance and vision that lies beyond our ability to describe it.

When I started the Woolf book, I was entirely new to aesthetics (now I'm just new), and began reading anything people would recommend.  I thank Betsy Warland for introducing me to Elaine Scarry's groundbreaking On Beauty and Being Just and Ken Probert for bringing in a review of Only a Promise of Happiness.  I found Dennis Donoghue's Speaking of Beauty on my own.  None of these books on beauty told me what I finally had to learn from Gadamer, Adorno, and Jusdanis:  that art's autonomy guarantees its freedom to critique the world it lives in, which I wrote about in my last post.  But books on beauty nevertheless do some important things.  First, they take the discussion of aesthetics out of the art gallery or concert hall or classroom and bring it to daily lives, which is where most of us experience beauty daily (I hope).  But second, these writers agree that we have to talk about beauty, that it can't be simply defined, just as I can't simply define the fall colours I love.  And that has a potential to create a sense of community.

When you expererience something beautiful, you want to share it with other people.  Think about it.  How often have you said "You have to read this book/go to this movie/listen to this music"?  As far back as Kant, we have realized two things about what he called the judgement of beauty.  One is that you imagine that everyone should share it.  The second is that you respect the sense that they don't.  You can't force people to agree with you about what's beautiful.  And imagine how impoverished and homogenous the world would be if we all agreed on what is beautiful.  Somehow a world that totally agrees about what's beautiful evokes images of uninventive, gargantuan concrete walls for me.  So if some of you, taking Nehemas's line on the "promise" of beauty, are thinking about my love of fall colours and observing that the only promise is winter and you think Saskatchewan winters suck, that's okay.  Because I have this goofy theory that what we find beautiful is an inherent part of our personalities, of who we are.


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

Ideas of home, and homelessness

Back from Banff, I'm being "disciplined" and working in a focused way on my book on Virginia Woolf's aesthetics, arguing that for Woolf the "autonomous work of art" and "political art" are not an antithesis, but that an author's use of an engaging and sometimes puzzling form forces the reader to bridge the gap between the work of art's autonomy and the political and social world it critiques.  There's no "message"; rather, there are puzzling moments that encourage the reader's reflection.  There's a fairly long philosophical tradition, beginning in the twentieth century with the work of Gadamer and Adorno and continuing in the twenty-first with the work of Scarry, Nussbaum, Donaghue,and Jusdanis, for this conception of the autonomous work of art. I think the upshot of all this theory is that autonomy provides both the writer and the reader with the most freedom.  The writer doesn't need to come up with answers or tow a party line, but only to ask how it is in the world.  And the reader is only urged to reflect and consider, to bring their own knowledge, context, and experience to bear upon the human questions.

Working on Woolf is not "being disciplined" because this is what the University expects me to do.  It's being disciplined because it's hard work balancing all I know about aesthetics (and, at my age, remembering all I know about aesthetics), all other critics have said about Woolf's novels and essays, and my vision of the work itself.  It requires a kind of single-minded focus.  And frankly, I want to get it done.  It's the last big project of my academic career.

And then there's the matter of timing.  After working on Soul Weather flat out at Banff, I needed some time away from the novel to think both deeply and freely about my characters and about the questions I have decided to explore in my own novel.  And frankly, thinking about how Woolf examines and critiques her culture without sending a "message" provides a lesson for the novelist, urging me to keep questions, not answers, top of mind as I work on Soul Weather, leaving my readers free to consider their own answers to the problems posed by this particular historical moment.

That free and deep thinking takes place in life's interstices--those moments when you think you're doing something else, like quilting or taking a walk with your daughter on a lovely fall day.  Veronica and I walked the Marsh Route around White Butte Trails east of Regina last Friday, and the smell of leaves and desultory conversation about what we'd cook for Thanksgiving prompted me from time to time to think about ideas of home.  I found myself considering "home" from Dirk's point of view.  I could see Dirk toward the end of the novel concluding that home may be as much about time as about space.  It's true, he thought, using my brain to do his thinking, that we think of home as a place because our memories are so physical:  the fall of light in the kitchen on an October afternoon mingling with the smell of a turkey that's nearly done, and the sound of family and friends talking in the next room; the feel of the linen napkins we inherited from Grandma and the texture and smell and taste of Grandma's pumpkin pie, which a daughter now makes.

But maybe "home" is also a time, Dirk thought, still using my brain, a time in our own lives and growth when we finally feel at home in our own skin and our own histories, a time when we've made peace with our mistakes and losses and decided that they're now a part of ourselves that we actually rather like.  A time when the past, the present, and the future seem to exist in comfortable harmony, when a sense of adventure mingles with a sense of being grounded.  Given that Soul Weather is trying to query and problematize the idea of home, I rather liked what Dirk was thinking.

And then I began to read Jack Layton's Homelessness:  How to End the National Crisis, as much for research as out of respect for this remarkable and hopeful man.  Layton must as some level understand rhetoric, for us realizes that it's going to take both statistics and moving portraits of real homeless people to allow us to see that there's no "stereotypical" homeless person.  While fifty years ago we might not have been far off concluding that many homeless people are single male alcoholics, the economy of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries have made homelessness a much wider problem that involves families as well. 

Here are some startling, admittedly selected facts:

• Homeless people have a death rate 8 to 10 times higher than those who are housed.
• It costs significantly more to house a homeless person than to provide them with a secure and stable roof over their heads.  In Toronto, keeping them in a shelter costs about $1990 a month;  subsidizing their rent costs about $700 a month; providing them with affordable housing costs about $200.  This doesn't include the enormous costs to a health care system trying to deal with the problems caused by stressful, overcrowded conditions in shelters or the even worse conditions for those "living rough."  Nor does it put a dollar amount on the struggle of the homeless person to survive and to keep some dignity and spirit intact. 
• Only about 3% of people lose their housing because of mental illness. 
• On the other hand, depression is widely experienced by the homeless.  You try not having any privacy.  Try not having a "home" in a culture that so stridently values success and equates success with a large house and two-car garage.  Try panhandling to get enough money for a coffee so you can have access to a washroom where you can go to the bathroom and clean up a little.  Here's the one that got to me:  you try not sleeping well, either on the street or in a shelter, for weeks on end and see if you don't become depressed.
• Most people are catapulted onto the streets by poverty: by unemployment or by low wages in communities with a high cost of housing. Others find the street a safer option than an abusive partner or parent.
• Climate change is only making it harder for the homeless:  more people are now dying of heat-related causes than of cold.

At one point, Canada was considered by the United Nations to be a leader in providing housing for those living on society's margins.  We're now a scandal, particularly since we have the world's 8th largest economy.

Homelessness is not a choice, as politicians perhaps like to think.  Nor are the homeless simply the "undeserving" rather than the "deserving" poor--a distinction that Charles Dickens questioned back in the middle of the nineteenth century in works like A Christmas Carol, but which still remains robust among politicians who think that a free market will fix everything.   "Homelessness is a political phenomenon" Jack Layton writes "--if we understand politics to be, among other things, the process that determines the allocation of our resources.  Housing is one of these resources.  Has out society determined that its resources will be distributed so that some community members have no housing?" (29).

So it's a good thing I'm working on Virginia Woolf, thinking about the autonomous work of art, blogging about homelessness, and letting my thinking about home settle for a while before I return to Soul Weather.  I like Dirk's idea about "home" being temporal as well as spatial.  But Layton's book makes me realize that there's more to it than that.  I need to discover how to let the reader see these other facets of home and homelessness without giving the reader a message.  But I don't need to be quite so true to my aesthetic ideals in a blog.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.  Appreciate home.

Goodbye to Banff

Wednesday night as I was thinking, after I wrote my last post, about what I wanted to do as a novelist, about the resources I have at hand for accomplishing this--a narrator's voice, the choice to creates scenes or summaries, the ideas about the world that shape these choices, every word in our rich language, the rhythms of a sentence or a snippet of dialogue, the ways I can capture the complexity and even inexplicability of human character--I was listening to the choral music of Arvo Part.  He's an Estonian composer of choral music that's minimalist and that has harmonies that call forth all that's beautiful in the human voice.  The Valentine Studio only has a little Sony CD player, but the lofty ceiling in my cabin makes it sound sublime.  While I listened to Part, the sound of a train added a dissonance that is also a kind of harmony in the mountains.  And beneath that there was the sound of wind in the lodge pole pines around my cabin, threaded through with the rustling that only aspens and birch can make.  I've done a poor job of describing this:  it can't be described, really, only experienced.

But I suppose what I'm trying to do with that awkward description is to talk about the creative act itself.  How it's made of plans and chance and accident.  Of course you need a vision of what you want to make.  But how often do you solve a problem by daydreaming in a coffee shop and hearing an exchange that in turn suggests possibilities that might get you out of the corner you've painted yourself into?  Or that might reveal that ill-lit corner of a character you want your reader to understand.  That you wanted to understand.



On some days, reaching out and touching the mind of someone else simply with your words is unimaginable, but must be done anyway.

And then on other days, your creative spirit is simply spent.  You want ordinary comforts like your husband and the purring of your crazy little cat.  And then you realize that they're not ordinary at all.

Five deer and the edge of disaster

On Tuesday evening I went for a walk and was rewarded with the company of five deer:  two does a and three fawns.  There are two sides of the road here.  One side is "safe," that is, there are woods and mountain.  The other side, where the Banff Centre is, is more settled.  The fawns were a little skittish when they were on the settled side and at one point raced and bounded back to the safe side, bleating away like little goats when their mothers wouldn't come.  Finally they ambled across the road again to join their mothers.  Countless people stopped their cars, got out and snapped a couple of pictures, got back in their cars, and raced away.  I stayed about half an hour watching them; so I got to hear the bleating and got to watch the fawns' awkward grace as they pronked and scallopped over the road.  The lady at the top of the page wasn't more than two metres from me when I took the photograph.

One of the things I love about Virginia Woolf's work is that she can take an "ordinary" day--any day Lily Briscoe spends with the Ramsays in Cornwall, or any afternoon Elinor does her benevolent single-lady errands in early twentieth-century London--and infuse it with the significance we should all be attentive to in every one of our days.  If one of the things literature should do is to prompt us to think about our own answers to the "overwhelming question," "How should one live?" then Woolf's answer is "Attentively."

I brought only one book with me to Banff, Per Petterson's latest novel, I Curse the River of Time, which I suspect I didn't get.  (In any event, I didn't particularly like it.  I may write about this at another time, or I may let it drop.)  I decided I'd let serendipity and the library here decide my reading.  I've been finding myself trying to accumulate less stuff, and taking books out of libraries rather than buying them seemed like a good idea.  So I took out Elizabeth Hay's Alone in the Classroom.  I loved Late Nights on Air, reading it twice, for pure pleasure, not because I didn't get it.  Hay is incredibly skilled at evoking a world:  I love her attentiveness to nature and weather and the places people live because it takes me right where the characters are.  I love the complexity, even the contradictoriness of her characters.

But we are so aware that all of the characters of Alone in the Classroom are on the edge of disaster. We know that two pretty young girls are going to die.  We know the young mother of two is going to fall disastrously in love with a much older man who is the former (and younger) lover of her favourite aunt.  We know that something is seriously wrong with Parley's mental health, but we don't know what. 

The part of me that's a defensive writer--which is to say someone who has spent about ten hours a day for the last week and a half writing a novel--both admires Hay's descriptive and narrative skill and wants to argue with her.  "Why don't we write novels any more about the way people go about their everyday lives, struggling to make sense of them and--every day--to realize their own desires while being caring members of communities and families?  Why do ethical dilemmas only involve extremes in novels these days?  Is there something about the early twenty-first century that dictates that drama lies only on the edge of disaster?  That it is only in the extremes that we are tested?  You can be kind or patient or heroic or committed or deeply thoughtful once a week.  Try doing it every day.  Try even trying to do it every day."

Am I hopelessly old-fashioned?