Days to retreat and reflect: paring back

The Mrs Dalloway chapter is done, coming in at a cool 40 pages.  I will leave it for a week while I read Woolf's diaries for the next few years, read the criticism of To the Lighthouse, and then re-read that perfect novel again.  In the meantime, I have to work up my courage to write, something the Dalloway chapter seemed to steal.  In its place, it has left what I have come to call "The Dalloway Headache."

So I had a plan for the long weekend, which the weather initially conspired to help me keep.  First, I made my Cardamom Bunnies, which somehow get made every year, regardless of how many chapters I need to write or how many essays I need to mark.  The comfort of kneading warm bread dough and the smell of cardamom in my kitchen seemed like a plausible antidote to "the Dalloway headache" and the fear of writing.  Bill and Veronica enjoyed the rabbits, but the headache stayed put.


On the windy, wet Good Friday, I turned to music. I am not at all religious, but I always mark the major Christian holidays with music, perhaps because I believe that these festivals have become part of what makes us human, and it is art that captures that humanity for me.  So I have listened to Bach's St. Matthew Passion with its extraordinarily calm depiction of suffering.  Through many of the movements there is a motif in the bases, a kind of tum-TUM that sounds like the beating of a heart.  Friday I listened to Verdi's Requiem.  During the magnificent and martial "Dies Irae"--Wrath of God--I couldn't quite say why it moved me so.  If I do believe in God, it isn't the angry deity of the Hebrew texts, but some curious and yet indifferent creative force who has made a magical world and people with consciousness (think how magical that is) and said "You've got all you need to thrive.  Let's see what you do with it."  Sheba undercut the fury of the Dies Irae even more by sitting on my lap and stretching one of her white paws toward my throat.  I called Veronica, who was listening to Arvo Part, to ask why we do this every spring:  listen to the sacred music of the season.  "We need to remember that people suffer and to pay attention to that suffering.  This seems like as good a time as any," was her wise response.  Sheba was deliciously unaware of any suffering.

On Saturday, we had our usual routines of morning coffee and grocery shopping.  And of course, we admired the thick sticky snow but not the northwest wind that had  fixed it to tree trunks and fences.  I settled down to read a biography of Thoreau.  Veronica and I, after our "debut" with my poems and her photographs at the Humanities Research Institute celebration of Ken Probert's life and its effect on the writing community, have committed ourself to do a book of poems and photographs.  I so love the way the photographs take me out of myself, challenging the practice of "confessional poetry" that began in 1959 with the publication of Robert Lowell's Life Studies.  Veronica's photographs are distinctly, relentlessly urban, though she's got some beautiful black and whites of Walden Pond.  While we were there, we saw the reconstruction of Thoreau's cabin.  It has everything a writer needs:  bed, chair, table, bookshelf, and stove.  One of his mottos, which I've got on a postcard somewhere, is "Simplify! Simplify!"  I'd like to end our book of photographs and poems there.

Yet Robert Richardson's biography of Thoreau makes it clear how complicated it was to simplify.  I hadn't realized how rich and complex was the philosophical tradition that led to Thoreau's lifestyle; certainly I didn't know about its German roots in Goethe's concept of Bildung.  Here is Bruford on the German idea of self-cultivation:  "The inwardness, the culture (bildung) of a German implies introspectiveness; and individualistic cultural conscience; consideration for the careful tending, the shaping, deepening, and perfecting of one's own personality."  This describes, I suppose, what we all need to do: self-reflect and learn from what we observes of ourselves.  It's a perfect prompt for a cold windy Easter weekend.  It also appealed to the Dalloway headache:  surely I could self-improve my way out of this?

Sunday I began by cooking.  I'm not much good anymore, as you know, at multi-tasking in the kitchen, so I tried to get as much done well in advance as I could.  I started to make bread only to discover that I was nearly out of white flour.  As a result of my alarm, I forgot to put in the salt.  Next was a lemon meringue pie--simple enough, I thought.  But it turns out I don't really know how to make lenon meringue pie:  I had no idea that you baked the meringue; my mother always broiled it.  More alarm.  Will this work?  The Dalloway headache had a field day with my cooking, enjoying especially the fact that half my tools are in the basement.  But Bill and I had a lovely evening with Veronica and Jenny.  Bless him, Bill did the dishes while I sat with my young knitters and marvelled at what they accomplish with two sticks (sometimes 5).

This morning, the Dalloway headache is a faint presence, but it seems to have taken with it any sense that I could tend or perfect my inward personality.  What inwardness?  I doubt this is what Thoreau thought of when he exhorted his fellows to "Simplify!"  There is sunshine.  There are cats who were grateful when I got up at 6 to feed them and then cuddled while I knitted.  Perhaps inwardness--thinking about why the Dies Irae moves you--is over-rated?  Or perhaps inwardness needs a clean slate once in a while.

Renovations, revisions, and a drive to Moose Jaw

We don't yet have a date for the kitchen destruction, but my skillful cabinet maker came on Wednesday to take a careful look at the room and firm up some of the plans.  In the meantime, I've been cleaning out drawers and cupboards, thinking about what is really necessary for the kind of cooking I do now.  There's a kind of archeology to this process:  as I dig into the back of drawers, I fetch up things like an avocado green hard-boiled egg slicer or the baby silverware or four differently-sized whisks. (I was looking for the perfect whisk, I suspect.)  I moved my kitchen into this house in 1990, when Veronica was 11, and haven't really cleaned out drawers since, though my cooking has changed dramatically.  There's now a box downstairs with items that will go to Community Living or some similar charity.  I'll leave them in the box, which I can get to easily in case I need something; but a month after reno, out they go.  If I haven't used them by then, I don't need them.  Even before the new kitchen is created, I have more space.

I have good feelings about revisions like this one.  Twice in my life, revision made an enormous difference.  There's the funny story:  about how I had posted a provile on LavaLife, (before it got cheesy) but wasn't getting much interest.  A close friend was dying, and the portrait of myself that I'd created was of someone facing a friend's mortality, facing the unfairness of a universe that took a friend in the prime of her life.  Serious.  No sense of play.  I no longer remember what inspired me, but one morning I rewrote my profile, making it much more playful and flirtatious.  Bill got in touch the next day; we met a week later after a series of insightful emails; I set a land speed record for falling in love.  I have actually shared this story with students in writing classes with the following moral: It always pays to revise.

Then there's the startling story.  When my insightful publisher, Ruth Linka, read the edited draft of Blue Duets, she said quite firmly "This ms is 120,000 words long.  You've got to get it down to 90,000."  She had two reasons for this.  One was simply that Blue Duets was a first novel and you can't sell first novels if they cost more than $20.  The second was aesthetic.  The novel tells a fairly small story--small in the context of books about wars, about injustice, about massive cruelty, about historical figures.  The manuscript, on the other hand, was bloated.

You have no idea how liberating it was to undertake that revision.  I had to decide what was important and to shave or sand away everything else.  If the novel has a coherent shape, it's because Ruth insisted on that revision.  If the reader clearly knows what's important, if she or he connects emotionally to Lila's experience, it's because there is less dross, fewer red herrings and false turnings.  When you find the right shape for a story, you can quit talking about it and let the story be the reader's guide.

This morning, I hit the road for Moose Jaw.  That's a non-sequitur if you've ever heard one.  But I'd gotten to the point in the chapter on Mrs Dalloway where I can't see the chapter's shape, where I'd lost the thread of its purpose. 

There are two elements to revising.  One is to literally re-see or re-view what you have made.  This part of the process forces you to take the long view, to step back and study the way the various pieces fit together, to see whether they're running alongside an elegant fence or simply held together, cruelly and crudely, with baling wire.  The second element brings you much closer to what you're written to see if the paragraphs hold together and have a coherent structure, if your mechanics are solid and keep the reader's confusion to a minimum.  Hence the need to drive to Moose Jaw.  On the road, I can't flip my pages back and forth defensively to tie up the bits of string that seem to be straggling between the pages.  If I can't recall the major steps in my argument while I study the prairie, I'm in trouble.  There's something about that huge landscape that makes one take the long view, the large view.  So I found where I'd gone awry and figured out where the next pieces of my argument should take me.

At the same time, driving to Moose Jaw at this time of year, when the landscape is as minimal as my kitchen drawers, makes you attend to detail.  Is that a hawk?  Are there birds in those nests?  Do I really see buds on these trees?  So you come back ready to do the other kind of revision, the less inspiring but nevertheless satisfying work of getting all the details in place. 

I like both elements of revision.  The large-scale version is a cheeky girl who's looking at you archly and saying "So?  So what?"  The smaller-scale version is a youthful engineer who is convinced everything will work better if all the pieces and screws and washers are in their right place.  If that machine is your stove or your sewing machine or your computer, you also value efficiency, tidiness, and a sense of purpose.  So of course you want your writer or your artist to make that thought as clear as possible so you are ready to grapple with the demands it's going to make of you to think in a new or different way.  Then it's your turn to hold the piece of writing or the work of art up to the world you see to see if you, too, need to revise.  The drive from Regina to Moose Jaw takes just the right amount of time for doing that.

Ken Probert: Our libraries, ourselves

On Wednesday I met with Bruce and Kathy Probert, Ken's brother and sister-in-law, to consider what might best be done with Ken's enormous and varied library.  We took the green tea Kathy had made and wandered the rooms upstairs, where the books were all hugger-mugger, some of them in large blue bins--perhaps moved from his office and sadly never unpacked.  There was one bookshelf devoted to beautiful books--a Folio Society slip-cased edition of Trollope's novels and a beautiful boxed set of Jane Austen; Grimm's complete Fairy Tales next to two lovely volumes of Sherlock Holmes.  He had a number of titles from McSweeney's publishing house, each put together in a way that playfully challenged what the book could be.  Part of the portrait that emerged here was that of a man who loved the beauty of books, who felt their seductions and satisfactions.
 
What an interesting portrait of a man who read Foucault and Freud, but who was interested in New Yorker covers and Edith Wharton's decorating style.  Books on slavery, the result of Ken's interest in nineteenth-century American literature, nudged books on World War I.  He wasn't simply interested in other places, though the Saskatchewan Encyclopedia had lost touch with Saskatchewan geography and history, so we did some sorting.  There was one island of order in all this:  Ken's set of Library of America editions, which will be a significant addition to the University of Regina Archer Library.  We never found, though, copies of the books he edited, Writing Saskatchewan, and Writing Addiction.  Ken's humility was clearly in overdrive.

Fortified by Kathy's tasty cookies which have healthy seeds and decadent chocolate chips, we went downstairs.  The "family room" had built-in bookshelves, and as I stood in front of them I suspected I could see the young Ken Probert organizing his intellectual passions as he filled the first bookshelves in his house.  There were all of G.B. Shaw's plays; a set of "complete poems" from all the important nineteenth-century Romantic poets (and a bit beyond):  Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Tennyson; three lovely volumes of Yeats. His more recent enthusiasms had built up in the spaces between, where Alice Munro was evident.

As I stood back to attempt to get a view of this wall as a whole, I suddenly found my memory inhabiting Buswell Street in Boston's Back Bay.  My first husband Dan and I had moved into Boston University married housing, while he worked on his Master's degree in music.  For three or four weeks, my own books remained in boxes:  can you imagine that university housing had no bookshelves?  I became, frankly, more and more depressed as I took buses to and from Brandeis University where I typed up (and slyly corrected) the writing of a group of social scientists.  (People caught on to my furtive improvement of their work and were pleased, though I do remember one very tall fellow looking at typed-up copy, reading the first page, and exclaiming "Did I write that?  Wow!"  I didn't enlighten him.)  I needed to have my books out, I told Dan miserably.  That weekend we headed to the nearest lumber yard where we bought the wood for bookshelves that my daughter Veronica continues to use.  Ken's boxed set of Austen will be happy there.

But as my mind conflated this memory with the books before me, I thought about our relationship to books.  First, how hopeful they are, how they speak to us of hope and adventure as we imagine reading them.  How they speak of our willingness to go to places deeply unfamiliar as well as half-known.  Even if some of the titles on our shelves are only there because we think they should be, they speak of better, deeper, wiser selves we hope to become.  (Until this year, Remembrance of Lost Things has filled that space on my bookshelves.)  How we organize them tells something about us.  Are they alphabetical, speaking of our penchant for order?  Do we have the beautiful books at eye level, the orange Penguin paperbacks down near the floor?  Do we fancy our high-falutin taste for European literature, and give them place of prominence?  Have we kept our Hesse?  Do we claim solidarity with the guys and set Cormack McCarthy next to Hemingway or show our support of women by putting Marge Piercy and Doris Lessing next to George Eliot and Margaret Drabble?  Do we slip in a little chick lit to prove we're not snobs?  Maybe The Jane Austen Book Club?  (I have a copy that Ken gave me.  He was my snob detector.)

Interestingly, the fiction was on shelves in another corner of the room:  most of the important British and American and Canadian fiction of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, all thumbed and annotated.  Any of us who have inherited Ken's well-read books can speak to what an intelligent, uncanny reader he was.

After we'd packed up some books I thought my colleagues would value--Helen Vendler on the Sonnet for Jeanne Shami, and Emily Dickinson and Edith Wharton for Cindy MacKenzie--the three of us stood in the hallway, a bit overwhelmed.  It had been in many ways a plangent and congenial afternoon thinking about Ken.  (Though I have to say that Ken has called me more than once on my love of that word "plangent.") As you will know, I simply had to bring up Virginia Woolf, particularly Mrs Dalloway, and this passage from the beginning of the novel, where Clarissa is walking across London to choose the flowers for her party:

Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.  (8)

"That's what we're doing with Ken's books," I told them.  "We're sending him out into the world."






      

Simplicity

At my age (sixty-two on Saturday), I find myself drawn to snippets in the media that consider the lives of seniors.  I note with some comfort that it's been decided that older folks' reaction times aren't really slower:  we simply choose to reflect for a moment before firing across the bow.  Even more comforting is the fact that older people are happier than their younger counterparts--this in spite of the fact that I have three seriously dedicated curmudgeons in my neighbourhood who provide daily examples of dissatisfaction, frustration, and even anger.  Apparently there are two reasons for our optimism and cheerfulness.  One is that we have more fully-developed coping mechanisms.  The second is perhaps (the scientists don't say this in so many words) that our apprehension of our mortality and our sense of history have conspired to teach us what's important. 

I'm finding that my sabbatical, in giving me time out of the fray of institutional and personal politics, battles for power and recognition (some very covert, but pervasive and poisonous nevertheless), time out from the necessity of multi-tasking and being constantly interrupted, has honed my sense of and whetted my appetite for what's important.  For the most part, this lies in simple, solitary things:  Sheba settling down next to my computer to purr while my thoughts about Woolf come with a richness and ease I couldn't have imagined.  (Believe me, this doesn't happen every day.  Right now, I'm avoiding writing the introduction to the Dalloway chapter by writing this blog post instead.)  Hearing my first robin on Saturday, kneading bread, knitting complicated lace or piecing quilts, reading Anna Akhmatove's poetry, arguing with Bill about the way movies reflect and influence our sense of what the world is like--these things are important. 

Reading Woolf, galloping ecstatically through Mrs Dalloway has had no small part in this hunger, for what she manages to do with her beautiful language and trenchant use of form is to remind us that experience is what matters, not money or power.  At the beginning of her eponymous novel, Mrs Dalloway thinks "In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June" (4).  Lily Briscoe, toward the end of To the Lighthouse, as she works on her painting, observes that "One must keep on looking without for a second relaxing the intensity of emotion, the determination not to be put off, not to be bamboozled.  One must hold the scene--so--in a vice and let nothing come in and spoil it.  One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy" (272).  Certainly Woolf gives us a kind of Buddhist advice to be in the moment, but with her language, the ecstasy of her sentence structure, the varieties of unique and everyday experience--brass bands and utilitarian chairs, she harnesses and directs our attention imaginatively.  It's all very well to be in the moment; what's important and life-saving is to recognize how complex, contradictory, chaotic, and miraculous the facets of that moment can be. 

Mrs Dalloway realizes how important it is to be grateful for all those people who make her magical life possible; in the same vein, let me thank all of you who sent birthday greetings, some of these coming from former students who are now far away, and whose words create the web of connections that is at the centre of Mrs Dalloway.  But it was Bill, Veronica, the weather, Golden Willow and the BBC's "Through the Night" radio program that gives you six hours of surprising music that made my day rich and peaceful. 

I've said that seniors have been taught by history and mortality to realize what's important.  I think our expectations change as well.  As we pack up for the various renovations to our house, I'm finding myself throwing out (or sending to Value Village) quite a few things I feel I no longer need, and putting things back in rooms slowly. I don't want to simply recreate the old living room and dining room, except for a beautiferous floor.  I want to put up the artwork that still moves or fascinates me, to put out the ceramics that seem to me to question what pottery can be.  I want a simplicity that lets me see each thing fully.  In the same vein, I have come to love simple birthdays.  Bill's gift (besides a wonderful meal at the Creek Bistro) was, as requested, a donation to BecauseIamagirl, a U.K. charity that focuses on girls' health, education, and well-being.  Veronica made me a pair of socks.

A pair of socks?  How underwhelming for a sixty-second birthday, you say?  Absolutely not.  These are "Crazy Samurai Zaubersocks."  I can see her choosing the Zauberball that leads off my post, thinking that these are her mother's colours.  Then she found the perfect pattern for them (which you can't really see in her photograph) from a book of Japanese knitting.  Then she improved on the pattern, which stopped at the ankle, with a lovely little cable which goes all the way down the foot.  Then serendipity loaned its delight.  Zauberballs have stripes of colour, but they seem not to repeat in a predictable way, so you can't make two identical socks.  Off-kilter socks for her off-kilter mother!  Perfect.

Simplicity, whether in your mind or your interior decoration, gives you time to think about what goes into your conversations with your husband or your daughter's planning (not to mention three weeks of knitting) of the perfect pair of socks.  Such simplicity needs time, however.  I'm worried that I will lose these quiet moments of knitting and music and reflection that deepen experience when I get back from sabbatical.  But maybe my off-kilter socks will remind me to be off-kilter and to take advantage of the disguise of a curmudgeon  to decline serving on some committees and to break off a mean-spirited or gossipy conversation, to spend time with the people and animals and thoughts that I love. 

Building a Flexible Democracy

Today Katherine Arbuthnott and I were having our Thursday morning breakfast together at Tangerine at the bracing hour of 7:30.  (We've done this four Thursday mornings in a row, so I suspect that constitutes a tradition in the twenty-first century.)  But Tangerine has deadly scones and great jazz, and Katherine and I have conversations that range from children and grandchildren to saving the world from itself, so stealing time early on Thursday is definitely worth it.  We were laughing about women who buy the latest anti-wrinkle cream or the lotion that makes your skin luminous.  We weren't laughing at them, you understand.  We were laughing at this example of what economists call "sunk costs."  You've done it:  invested in something you can tell isn't working and then invested in even more in it, just in case you're not using enough cream or drinking enough water with echinacea or giving that deadbeat lover enough of a chance.  You've invested more in a losing strategy just to prove you're not a complete fool.  Here's how Katherine describes it in a paper she's working on:

"The term 'sunk cost' refers to previous investments that are irretrievable, but have no influence on future outcomes.  Thus, consideration of such past costs for future investments violates the principles of rational decision-making.  This is a reasoning error because we cannot change the past (e.g., recover spent resources), but we can make better or worse decisions about future strategies, independent of our past decisions or mistakes."

After we got through laughing about the useless cream and the even more useless lover, we considered what this theory tells us about how we're responding to climate change.  Because building a Keystone XL Pipeline or a Northern Gateway Project  is sunk cost with a vengeance.  Yes, fossil fuels have made possible the culture and technology that heats and lights our homes and keeps us in contact with farflung friends and even organizes uprisings against dictators.  But first, we know that supply is limited.  Second, we know that we're overheating the planet and destroying habitats and plant and animal species.  So why aren't our leaders (sorry:  you've heard me harp on this before) changing directions and putting money behind solar or geothermal sources of energy?

It turns out there are reasons why we pursue losing policies, reasons that public opinion--yours--might do something about.  First, leaders are severely criticized for changing their minds.  We don't see this as a rational shift brought about by better and newer data.  It's waffling.  But surely at a time when change is occurring so fast that few of us can keep up (how many of you have updated your Facebook home page and embraced the new format?), changing your mind might be a virtue.  If we praise these changes, say about the decision not to spend billions on fighter jets, we might make it easier for leaders to reconsider their policies and their choices.

Second, even when we're given good information about choices, we almost always see the information about the choice we've been inclined to make as better than information that contradicts our past decisions.  So we need to build into our decision-making committees and our governments room for the devil's advocate who can call us on that bias.  We might have called that advocate "Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition" (as an American, I love that phrase), except that they seem to be understandably in disarray right now.  But maybe we can inject the virtues of the devil's advocates in our conversations over the next three years or so and help Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition see the honour in and importance of that role.  We all need a reality check:  that's why I've got wise people like Bill and Veronica and Katherine in my life.  It's perfectly honourable to embrace people who tell you occasionally that...you get my drift.  So let's make it honourable and functional in politics and in other groups that undertake important decisions.

I came home from breakfast to my other task for the day:  to write the introduction to my chapter on Mrs Dalloway.  That accomplished,  I took myself off for a glorious walk on the creek bank.  I joined the world of dog people, including one young man who wanted to tell me about his 9-week-old Brittany Spaniel who nibbled my fingers, and whippet who put her sleek, elegant head into my outstretched hands.  Am I a dog person in a cat person's body or a cat person in a dog person's body?  I noticed that at the Robinson Street Bridge willow leaves fell after the ice formed and now the ice around them is melting more quickly, so it looks like the creek is full of tiny, flashing 3-D fish. I overheard snippets of conversations about someone's instability and the tea towels that were in the box along with....  I know, I know, having this walk on the 15th of March is gloriously abnormal.  But the warm weather isn't a nice side-effect of climate change; it's caused by a shift in the polar jet stream.  The lack of snow and the grass fires are a worrisome result of the kinds of fluctuations in precipitation patterns we can expect.

So, besides your own secret story of sunk costs, you've got a story about what happens when we get out of our houses and our cars and are living in the world, on the earth and in the mud and breeze again.  That experience is worth saving.  So let's get busy and talk about ways we and our leaders can honourably change our minds and embrace our inner devil's advocate.

The Ethics of the Imagination: Virginia Woolf (again)

In 1976, when I finished the coursework for my Master's Degree at the University of Michigan, I had a day to wander Ann Arbor (and Ann Arbor's book stores) before I packed myself up and returned to Winnipeg, where I was living at the time.  I felt strangely grown up, partly because taking courses at the University of Michigan during three consecutive summers was intellectually exhausting, and because I was going to start a Ph.D. at the University of Manitoba in the fall.  But there was also something about the lush, verdant Ann Arbor summer; my sense that my marriage was in trouble; a married man with a wonderful voice who had found me attractive (but neither of us would or could do anything about it); and a desperation to figure out what I could do besides return home.  People with an M.A. in English have no obvious job skills (it was even less obvious then than it is now), so I bought a book:  Max Frisch's Sketchbook 1966-1971.  I was attracted to the entirely different kind of reading that this would be, to the idea of being inside a writer's head, to the idea of European sophistication that seemed so unlike my entirely existential uncertainty.  One of the first entries contained this question at the bottom of the page:  "If you believe strongly in an idea, would you be willing to impose it on other people?"  There was a strategic page turn while you contemplated this question.  At the top of the next page, Frisch asked "Why not, if you are right?"

That question has bothered me for years, but was only answered by the work I am now doing on Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway.  Here is Woolf's diary entry for 27 August 1918, but completed three days later:

"Now I confess that I have half forgotten what I meant to say about the German prisoners; Milton & life.  I think it was that    ?  (all I can remember now (Friday August 30th) is that the existence of life in another human being is as difficult to realise as a play of Shakespeare when the book is shut.  This occurred to me when I saw Adrian [Woolf's younger brother] talking to the tall German prisoner.  By all rights they should have been killing each other.  The reason why it is easy to kill another person must be that one's imagination is too sluggish to conceive what his life means to him--the infinite possibilities of a succession of days which are furled in him, & have already been spent"  (Diary 1 186). 

Use your imagination to put that entry beside one way of looking at Mrs Dalloway.  While the novel's characters have a range of ways of seeing and understanding the complexity of other people, Woolf illustrates two extremes.  One belongs to what I call the fundamentalists, people who know they're right, people who have taken a body of knowledge or belief, like psychology or Christianity, and turned it into certainty, judgmental, destructive people like Miss Killman and Dr. Bradshaw.  Then there are people like Clarissa who can imagine the integrity and the experience of others.  It would take me paragraphs and paragraphs to give you the subtle evidence of Clarissa's view of others, but let me simply offer a synecdoche and a single example.  For Clarissa, who looks frequently out of a window and glimpses the old woman living in the house next door, the notion that "here is one room; there another" is one of life's mysteries and miracles.  Those rooms stand, I think, for the individual's integrity which wraps them round like a shell or a room.  We should no more break into that integrity by telling them "that they were this or were that" (7) than we would break into their house.  Clarissa can also imagine the suicide of a young man she's never met, a suicide that's talked about at her party:  "Always her body went through it, when she was told, first, suddenly, of an accident:  her dress flamed, her body burnt.  He had thrown himself from a window.  Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes.  There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness.  So she saw it.  But why had he done it?"  (156).

It's no accident that Woolf couples Milton or Shakespeare and life and German prisoners.  Milton urges us to understand Satan, to see both his hubris and his charisma.  Current research is leading psychologists to understand that a process they call "deep reading," which is essentially getting lost in a book, is crucial to the development of empathy.  Woolf's final unfinished essay is called "The Reader."  It concludes, or comes to a full stop, with her imagining a reader faced with Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy:  "It is here then that we develop faculties that the play left dormant.  [Earlier she'd imagined a literary world dominated by drama rather than essays or the novel.]  Now the reader is completely in being.  He can pause;  he can ponder; he can compare; he can draw back from the page and see behind it a man sitting alone in the centre of the labyrinth of words in a college room thinking of suicide.  He can gratify many different moods.  He can read directly what is on the page, or, drawing aside, can read what is not written.  There is a long drawn continuity in the book that the play has not.  It gives a different pace to the mind.  We are in a world where nothing is concluded" (Essays 6, 601).

The world of art is one in which nothing is concluded but everything imagined or suggested or questioned. Or as W.H. Auden put it in his poem, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats,"

For poetry makes nothing happen:  it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

Art, poetry, the novel, provide moments for reflection, ask questions about how it is with the world and with ourselves, but it isn't an instruction manual.  It doesn't change the world.  What it changes is our thinking, and it cannot predict or determine how those changes will occur--or even if they will occur.

In the past, I've been tempted to begin my English 100 and 110 classes by telling my students, some of whom really don't want to be there, that their imagination is their only ethical faculty.  But I've never been able to do it.  If they don't understand by the end of thirteen weeks of me how the imagination works, my sermon, or "peroration," as Woolf would call it, isn't going to bring the message home.  Besides, if I began my class that way, I'd become one of the fundamentalists.

So last night, as I was chopping eggplant to make vegetarian chilli, and looking out at the blue hour, I was thinking of Clarissa Dalloway.  I have a word to describe the world's Bradshaws and Killmans.  I call them fundamentalists.  I don't care whether their certainty comes from religion or politics or science; certainty in this ever-shifting world (I was watching the light change) is dishonest and destructive.  And maybe stupid.  I can't find a single word that sums up Clarissa Dalloway's attempt to understand or just be curious about the people in her life.  Maybe language is teaching me something:  there is no word to sum up the people who rebel against the tendency to sum up.  But suddenly Max Frisch's question popped back into my head.  And I said out loud, thirty-six years later, "Because I'm a writer and a teacher.  I create spaces for people to think and suggest that there are many, many perspective from which we can see the world.  The rest is up to each person I touch.  Clarissa Dalloway is right:  here is one room, there another."

(Women) On the Edge

When we come to Victoria, we always see if something is on at the Belfry Theatre, which has made a comfortable if worn theatre space out of an old church.  It seems that we've hit a period when theatre audiences want to be entertained, perhaps because of financial instability and undertainty around the world:  last spring when Veronica and I were in New York City, we couldn't find a single play that wasn't either a comedy or a musical, and we even checked off off Broadway and the NYTimes theatre reviews.  Nothing but upbeat stuff.  Regina's own Globe Theatre opted this year for lighter fare, and we opted not to subscribe.  But the Belfry is unafraid of ideas or uncomfortable feelings and they've never disappointed us.  This trip, we saw On the Edge, a new play by Michele Riml.

Susinn McFarlen plays three women, Simone the fashion addict, Jess the cop, and Marilyn the wife trying to clear some space in her life with a yoga class.  Each of these characters has a thirty-minute monologue whose words often imply the questions or demands of another presence.  McFarlen's acting is superb; you'd have to have your lines and your delivery down cold for a one-hander like this, but she goes even farther.  Each character has a different body language, a different approach to the space of the nearly empty theatre.  We can even watch Marilyn manage to get better and better at her yoga through classes we suspect go for three or four months; we can watch her relationship to her body change profoundly.

But the real star here is Riml's script.  I'll admit that I wasn't terribly sympathetic to Simone the fashion addict, whose monologue is her introduction of herself to a kind of "fashion-addict's anonymous," as she explained an upper-middle-class life of entertaining and socializing where she was a kind of mannequin for her husband's status.  I could certainly muster the feminist ire I couldn't quite give Carmen, though:  intellectually I pitied a woman whose identity was a matter of which elite salespeople she knew and which designers she wore.  Simone embodied consumerism at its worse, the kind of aesthetic error Alexander Nehemas writes about in Only a Promise of Happiness:  for this person, the aesthetic has nothing to do with what is original or daring or fresh or expressive of themselves, but only what is already prescribed.  Yet Simone admits that her husband had had enough of her simply showing up "in costume"--this designer for that event.  He too had tired of her lack of self, and when she didn't take the hint he simply abandoned her.  I think my distance from Simone is embodied in that word above:  "pity."  I pitied her inability to stand outside of her own framework for a millisecond, even when challenged to do so.  Nevertheless, I found Riml's critique to be incisive.

It was Jess the cop who really moved me.  Simone's body language was entirely elegant and self-possessed, even when she lacked self-possession.  Jess is the woman who's been taught to be uncomfortable with her body, to take on the mannerisms that serve as protective colouration.  She and a male newbie are getting ready to interrogate a woman whom they suspect of having committed a hit and run that has put a young boy's life in the balance.  We get to hear Jess's mind working and we can see that when it comes to figuring people out and dealing with evidence she's a crackerjack cop.  But she begins her monologue with the newbie with a highly inappropriate anti-woman joke and talks through her monologue about being disgusted by the porn she saw her male colleagues looking at during their breaks.  Her superior officer thanks her for dealing with this problem, but her colleagues take to calling her "mom."  That is, until she sleeps with a co-worker, when the term is now "slut."  The guys have to keep her in one of the simplistic, manageable categories they have historically assigned women to.  By the end of the monologue we can see that this misogyny has taken a toll on Jess's personal life, but it's something we can see her coming to terms with and deciding to change.  Unlike Simone's husband calling her to task, Jess's recognition is entirely personal.  Believe me, she's not getting any help, except for the fact that she has a daughter at home.  Come to think of it, maybe that's help enough.

If Jess made me profoundly sad, Marilyn made me cry.  I don't know whether this is part of Riml's plan, but with each monologue we seem to go more deeply into the character.  Simone is all surface; Jess is trying to deal with the way work has boxed her in and shaped her life.  Marilyn is dealing with a partner who is purposefully or inadvertently sabotaging every desire she has.  Marilyn's favourite word, particularly at the beginning, is "Sorry."  She arrives at a yoga class recommended for a problem she's having with one of her hips; she's late.  She apologizes to her instructor.  Her phone rings.  She apologizes again, but explains she's got to get it.  Her resposne to her husband implies his part of the dialogue.  How much is this class costing?  She needs to pick up his dry cleaning and to get him some razor blades.  Does the remember the dinner they're giving tonight?  It's clear that he resents the cost of this class, though he's willing to send her to get expensive wine for the clients he entertains.  Why does she need to do this?  She doesn't dare turn the phone off because that will shut off the GPS and he won't know where she is.  All the same, Jess keeps coming to class, becoming stronger, more flexible.  When encouraged to be in the present moment, to appreciate "now" she goes ballistic.  She hates now.  Now is her husband's demands, his devaluing of her.  Now hurts.  But at the end of the play, during the final meditative part of a yoga class, she meets a serene, older version of herself who is encouraging her to make a leap.  Over the edge.  But obviously that phrase means two things.  You can be pushed over the edge by misogynistic fellow workers or blood-sucking husbands.  But you can also choose to make a hopeful leap into the future.

 Are holidays always one day too long?  Yesterday, Victoria was remarkably windy, and while the natives were out walking their dogs (almost every one of them in a hoodie or a toque, admittedly), we felt buffeted and exhausted by trying to figure out what to do on a miserable day in an unfamiliar city.  We'd done the art gallery.  We'd done the museum, which I should have talked about in an earlier blog.  The unchanging part of the museum was slightly frustrating;  in fact, it hasn't changed an iota since we were first there about eight years ago.  This royal museum, at least, hasn't engaged with the possibilities of the twenty-first century.  But we saw an exhibition of prize-winning wildlife photography, some of them taken by photographers as young as ten.  These artists see the world with an engagement which may be one way of saving us from our apathy.  Nature is too beautiful for us to continue to destroy it.  The younger artists had sometimes followed their subjects for three or four days, looking for exactly the right conditions, the right  light, the right gesture to illuminate what they saw.  The wise old eye of a rhinoceros.  Unimaginable fish.  The beauty of an oil spill, which photographer Daniel Beltra said he attempted to capture on purpose, because if it was beautiful we wouldn't be afraid to talk about it.  (I wonder what Susan Sontag would say?)  A moment to look unfamiliar primates in the eye:  a tiny cream-coloured baby monkey huddled into itself to keep warm.  A gorilla looking at you appraisingly.  What do you have to tell him about his habitat?  About poaching?   A fox who had almost learned to trust the photographer:  wildness personified. 

Grey and Red: Carmen over breakfast

When you come to Victoria in February, you can get almost any kind of weather.  On the one hand, the snowdrops and the crocuses are up and the tulips and daffodils have emerged.  On the other hand, it can rain for days at a time.  We touched down at about 9 a.m. on Thursday morning, with many days of rain forecast, and so made the most of the sunshine, walking in Sidney and driving to the north edge of the Saanich peninsula, and walking down the rather twee, touristy mall on Government to visit two Victoria institutions, Murchie's Tea and Munro's Bookstore.

Sure enough; yesterday morning the rain and the wind had moved in.  So we drove off to look for a quilt shop west of Victoria and then came back to the city, planing to spend the afternoon in the lovely art gallery here.  There was an Emily Carr exhibitioin on, which made Bill ecstatic.  And it's fun for me to simply stand next to him, listening to his reactions to her work. I'm reminded of how much freer he is to simply have a reaction and to art; unlike me, he doesn't feel that need to reason or analyze, but simply enters the world of the canvas before him. 

I was more drawn to work that echoed the colours of the landscape around us:  beautiful serene greys and taupes of a Japanese Woodcut or an Art McKay that wasn't one of his mandalas. I've often noticed that you leave an art gallery seeing the entire world with more care, curiosity, and intensity, but I hadn't thought about an aesthetic you took in with you.

Afterwards, we drove through the rain up the eastern coast of the island and noticed how this weather hadn't affected the natives.  Three elderly ladies in bright clothes and even brighter umbrellas were setting out for a walk along the beach.  I would have taken a photographs if they had stood still long enough!  Another hardy soul was sitting under an enormous umbrella looking out to sea.  Everyone here is cheerful and helpful, in spite of the grey weather.  Perhaps like Veronica in Cambridge, they simply take the beauty on its own terms.

Then last night we went to see Bizet's Carmen.  I haven't been to live opera in years, having found the productions in Winnipeg difficult to believe in and the singers' voices strained out of tune by the need to project to the back rows of the Winnipeg Centennial Auditorium.  But holidays are partly for doing things you wouldn't normally do and for shaking yourself out of the apathy of habit.  So since the opera was on, we went.  This young cast had wonderful, agile, expressive voices and the look of the whole production was so engrossing that whether to believe in it or not didn't occur to you.  The set designer made wonderful use of a curving openwork wooden structure that moved on a turntable.  It not only served as someplace for the children's chorus to climb, but it marked "inside" and insiders from "outside" and outsiders. 

Carmen is definitely an outsider, a gypsy who is true only to her own desires.  Whether you love her or not doesn't matter; in fact, it might be a disadvantage to love a woman who can't resist seeking what she doesn't have.  As Bill and I walked back to our hotel through the damp air last night, I tried to sum up my reactions, but it took some coffee and a view of the bay this morning to make clear what I'd felt.  I thought (here's me being analytical again) that I should have been able to bring some feminist ire to Carmen's death, but I couldn't.  After all, women have been punished for centuries when they follow their desires, and being stabbed for being unfaithful smacks of the intimate misogynistic violence that feminists everywhere are attempting to challenge.

At the same time, there seems to me something profoundly anti-social to say, in effect, "The only thing that matters to me is that I get what I want.  I don't care what I do to other people in the process."  We can't live that way.  So with beautiful music, exquisite voices, a compelling character whose very attractiveness is her fatal flaw, Bizet unsettled me.  Looking over a cup of coffe at my husband and at a sky that was trying hard to shake its clouds, this seemed a very good thing.

Literature and Memory III: The Hare with Amber Eyes

Ideas seem to ricochet through my nind like bullets in a steel-lined elevator.  For my book on Woolf, I re-read Percy Lubbock's 1921 The Craft of Fiction, which Woolf said was the first book (after James's prefaces, of course) to call the novel an art.  Lubbock was an acolyte of James's, and much of Lubbock's attempt to illustrate the resources of point of view makes use of examples from the master.  Talking about The Ambassador, Lubbock notes that James's use of Strether as a narrator provides us with a kind of doubled layer of narrative.  One layer concerns Chad Newsome and the European life Strether hopes to rescue him from.  The second layer concerns Strether's thoughts, reactions, analysis of the events that are unfolding.  Lubbock's suggestion that James had managed to make someone's thoughts and reactions the centre of a narrative primed me in some ways to read deWaal's The Hare with Amber Eyes.  I read it partly for pleasure, partly because it's written by a fine ceramicist who has a wonderful way of describing the lives of objects, the way objects circulate in people's lives and in material culture.  It's research for Soul Weather.  Hence the ricocheting bullets.

De Waal's narrative is, on the surface, a simple if twisted one.  When he inherits 264 pieces of Japanese netsuke from his uncle, he wants to know the history of the collection.  So he learns about Charles Ephrussi who is the intellect and art historian of the unimaginably wealthy Jewish Ephrussi family who managed to turn their handling and shipping of grain from Odessa into a banking empire that rivalled the Rothschilds'.  During the nineteenth-century Parisian craze for japanisme, Charles (who is part of Proust's source for Charles Swann and can be seen in Renoir canvases), began amassing his collection of netsuke, in between collecting Manet, Monet, and Renoir.  He was an important part of the Parisian art scene, writing about art in the best journals and often serving as the patron who gave financial help when needed, or encouraged an artist to finish a canvas.  When Charles's Viennese cousin Viktor marries, he sends Viktor and his new wife Emmy the collection, which is then housed in Emmy's dressing room where the children come to see their fashion plate mother every night as she dresses to go out.  While she's undergoing her hour-long encasement in layers of undergarments, the children play with the netsuke and she tells them stories about the lively, imaginative figures.

About the time the children leave home to go about their lives, the Nazis march into Vienna.  Mayhem ensues, and families like the Ephrussis have their "ill-gotten" collections confiscated for museums or for the personal pleasure of high-ranking Nazis.  Emmy commits suicide, but Viktor and the children escape, settling down in Mexico or America or Britain.  When the war ends, Elisabeth, deWaal's grandmother, who studied law in Vienna, revisits that city to see if she can reclaim any of the family's property or their shares in the bank that was made over to their father's Gentile partner.  But Vienna doesn't like unpleasantness or uncomfortable memories.  So the partner says he doesn't remember any Ephrussi (whom he worked with every day for years) and Elisabeth returns to England only with a suitcase full of netsuke.  Emmy's maid Anna confiscated them piece by piece as she worked for the Nazis and sewed them up in her mattress for the duration of the war. 

Seen through the lenses of anti-Semitism, the story is anything but simple.  Attempting to understand Charles's social life, de Waal read some of the French anti-Semitic literature, learning, for example, that even in a culture that thrived on duels, Jews were outsiders.  After all, a Jew has no honour; he can hardly duel to get it back.  Jews are insatiable; their taste in bric-a-brack is the taste of children.   Newspaper articles speak slyly or venomously about the various members of the Ephrussi family.  De Waal even finds in his London library a translation of one of the books on the Jews of Paris; next to the paragraph on the Ephrussis, someone has written in block capitals "venal."  De Waal writes "I wonder how these brothers lived their lives in these conditions.  Did they shrug their shoulders, or did it get to them, this incessant hum of vilification, mutterings about venality, the sort of constant, bubbling animosity that the narrator in Proust's novels remembers of his grandfather" (94-5)

Several years ago I went to a concert of Strauss waltzes and music from Viennese operettas.  I remember thinking, careless of my history, that I was hearing the beginnings of Nazism.  There was something about this enthusiastic delight in the saccherine or the sentimental that I suspected was ripe for turning mean.  Yet the picture that de Waal gives us of Austria's rapid capitulation to Hitler, of buses and police cars that are marked with Swastikas mere hours after Hitler begins his march to Vienna, of the Viennese delight in breaking into the houses of wealthy Jews and looting and destroying as if they've been granted permission to be drunken adolescents suggests I wasn't terribly far off.  This was a side of Nazism I knew nothing about.  I mostly knew about Kristallnacht, and imagined small shopkeepers threatened and destroyed; and of course I've read The Diary of Anne Frank and I've seen the shocking footage taken when Allied soldiers open up the death canps.  But even money didn't protect you from anti-Semitic opportunism,  reminding me that it's important to see events like the Holocaust from as many directions as you can.  Emmy's suicide notwithstanding, none of the Ephrussis we come to know died.  But de Waal does not allow the miracle of the netsuke's survival to be some kind of life-affirming, art-affirming miracle or redemption:  "The survival of the netsuke in Anna's pocket, in her mattress, is an affront.  I cannot bear for it to slip into symbolism.  Why should they have got through this war in a hiding-place, when so many hidden people did not?  I can't make people and places and things fit together any more.  These stories unravel me" (283).

What is redemptive in this story, and what Lubbock made me attuned to, is de Waal's narration.  The Hare with Amber Eyes isn't simply about the historical context for the netsuke's movement from Japan to Europe and back to Japan before de Waal inherited it. De Waal is a dogged, imaginative researcher and does everything possible to situate these tiny, lively objects in the cultures which appreciated them.  But the most remarkable moments are those where he stops to attempt to understand the inner lives of the people who owned them, like that passage above about the way Charles and his brothers coped with the anti-Semitism that pervaded Paris.  Here is another:  "I have Viktor's passport and a thin shake of letters between members of the family, and I put these out on my long desk.  I read them again and again, willing them to tell me what it was like, what Viktor and Emmy feel as they sit in their house on the Ring.  I have folders ot notes from the archives.  But I realise that I can't do this from London, from a library.  So I go back to Vienna, to the Palais [the Ephrussi family hom in the Ringstrasse]" (248).  There, standing on the balcony, using the details of the story that have come down to him--the six members of the Gestapo in their perfect uniforms who walk straight in, the looters that threw Emmy's dressing table over the balcony and laughed when it smashed, Viktor comes as close as he can to understanding the experience of his family.

It's the attempt to understand someone besides yourself that serves as one of the best ways of preventing holocausts or pogroms or acts of terrorism, and this attempt is threaded through de Waal's narration.   The final part of the story shows de Waal doing this with the lightest hand.  De Waal often travels to Japan, sometimes simply to see his great uncle Iggie, sometimes to work on his ceramic practice, and he comes to know his uncle and his uncle's partner Jiro Sugiyama quite well.  Their living arrangements are carefully described and there are photographs of the two of them, but de Waal never uses the word "homosexual."  Because that's a label like the word "Jew"; it allows you to put someone in a box, to write them off.  Rather, these are two men who went to the opera, bought some land outisde Tokyo for a cottage and bought a plot for their tombs.  Jiro is an excellent cook.  In a moment of remarkable cleverness, Iggie adopts the younger Jiro.  Again, de Waal doesn't comment, but this is clearly a way of getting around inheritance laws.  If Jiro can't inherit as Iggie's partner, he can do so as his son.

It is possible to see netsuke as mere bibelots, tiny, clever carvings.  But de Waal tells a story of a carver who disappeared for several days into the forest and came back to explain he had wanted to watch the deer, which he then proceeded to carve with an elegant, intimate understanding of them.  It's that curious, that close attention to the particulars of someone or something other than yourself that helps us be more humane.

Questions about home

Wednesday night, after a day of banging and sanding that made my house seem more like a beaten drum or a cave beneath an avalanche, Bill and I were driving home in the dark from a workout.  Somehow my experience of home--the retreat to the crowded treehouse, the relentless noise beneath me, made everything strange, and as I drove down a familiar street it was if I was seeing it for the first time.  You could have told my I was driving in an older residential neighbourhood in Edmonton or Montreal and I'd have nodded in agreement and asked for directions.  "Home" has been redefined by the limited space and the limited kinds of space we have, as well as by the ways other people occupy that space, shutting us out of it while they try to make it a more beautiful home.  We can do everything we need to live here--eat, sleep, shower--yet there is no space that's just for living in.  We spend most of our time in my small study (nicknamed the treehouse) where I read, write or work on quilts.

Today, after a short sanding this morning and another coat of stain, the cats and I had a quiet early afternoon in the treehouse.  Some things are becoming familiar for them.  Whether the door is closed or not (as it certainly is when Greg is putting something surely toxic to cats on the floor), they hang out with me.  When someone comes up the walk, they head for the back of "their" closet.  About three, in an attempt to stave off boredom, I put treats in a kong that Sheba rolls over the floor, puzzled but eager, trying to get her favourite food to fall out, while Twig watches.  I read and sleep.  The noise has made me incredibly tired, so tired I can sometimes nap right through it.  Veronica's friend Jenny thinks that we're worn out by trying to ignore the noise below, which is often alarming.  Or perhaps it's a week and a half of being at home in a small room and inside Virginia Woolf's head that is at least partly the cause of my sleepiness.  But today, because we finally had a respite, I was intensely aware of the more peaceful sounds in the house.  Tiny Sheba snores like a lumberjack.  We have two squirrels living in the eaves above the alcove where I have my desk.  They were chatting with one another today over my head and then scrambling in the eaves and up the stucco walls of the house to the roof.  For small creatures, they were quite noisy.  In the middle of Friday afternoon, even College Avenue is quiet, the odd car sounding almost laconic, perhaps even bored.

Late this afternoon, we needed to collect ourselves and leave again for about four hours.  I'm not good at "killing time," but Bill is an enormous help.  We went downtown for coffee, read our respective books, and then roamed Cornwall Centre.  We went out for dinner.  Then for the last hour, we went to the MacKenzie Art Gallery.

I love the MacKenzie on Friday nights.  There were perhaps one or two other people there, but for the most part we had the gallery to ourselves. You can take your time.  You can look closely at a work and then back up slowly to consider it from different viewpoints without worrying that you'll back into someone.  You can talk out loud without worrying that your inane, clueless--or even perhaps insightful comments will disturb the thoughts of other viewers.  But I think it's mostly the lighting, which is designed for normal daytime viewing.  At night, each work seems to occupy its own penumbra of light, setting it off in a mysterious yet celebratory way. This was particularly true of the Schumiatcher Sculpture Court which has an exhibition called "Hard Rock.  Heavy Metal."  It includes a charmingly foreshortened view of a Joe Fafard cow and a whimsical bench by Vic Cicansky.  Also a pair of overdone Rodin lovers (I preferred the honesty of the cow).  Some of the sculptures, though, were assemblages, and in the unusual light you were sure for a moment you knew what they were for.  Then their wonderful strangeness suddenly returned again.

But my favourite was a video installation called "Sunrise" by David Claerbout.  The scenario is simple.  We see a maid bicycling to work in a modernist glass house, and watch her work there:  washing floors, cleaning glass, sweeping up debris on the modenist deck, cleaning the chrome that envelopes the classic leather chairs.  The camera work is extraordinary, turning the geometry of the glass house into abstract compositions that the maid either resolves or muddles.  Like the maid's uniform, the house is black and white. The simplicity of the space is both appealing and estranging.  There is none of the untidy effluvia of life; rather, the natural world provides most of the decor, beautiful, even on an early spring or late fall day.  But of course you need a maid to keep its impossibility clean.  In one of the final scenes, she puts out the simple white plates, cups and saucers for breakfast and fills up the Bodum coffee press.  The scene looks serene until the camera's vantage point changes and you realize that the house's three inhabitants will sit in a row on small metal stools about four feet apart, removed from one another by verticals holding up the long tabletop so that any intimacy is impossible.  The ideal of the clean white modernist space (perhaps this was built by Le Corbusier or by one of his acolytes--"a machine for living") so free of the untidiness of life, suddenly looks like a prison.  A beautiful, balanced, serene, inviting prison.  The eighteen-minute video asks a dozen questions about home, as does my empty living room with its beautiful floors.