By the skin of our teeth

Here is my idiosyncratic news culled from the last couple of days:

• The Americans approach the "fiscal cliff" because Republicans refuse to tax the wealthy.
• Demonstrations occur in Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, where government cutbacks have created instability and high levels of unemployment.  In Spain, they blame the bankers.  Maybe we need to update Shakespeare's line from Henry VI about the lawyers:  "First thing we do, let's kill all the bankers."
• My environmental network is telling me that the current managers of the PFRA lands, which the provincial government wants to sell, are being muzzled, forbidden to comment on the value of the million acres of native prairie and sustainably grazed pasture, in spite of the fact that they know that land and understand its importance and its management from the inside out.  Nevertheless Candace Savage, recent winner of the Hillary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Non-Fiction, will be speaking to interested people on Thursday November 22 at 7 in the Education Auditorium, and a group of people interested in saving the PFRA lands from the auction block will gather on Friday, November 23 at the Orr Centre, 4400 4th Avenue (on 4th and Lewvan Drive).
• Meanwhile, Harper is calling into question the charitable status of any organization that doesn't tow the conservative line, particularly on environmental issues.
• Then, of course, we come to the Faculty of Arts and the English Department.  In some ways, what is happening here is clear:  the provincial government is demanding that U of R become "more efficient," and is forcing that efficiency on us by threatening to give us no increase in our funding or by holding us to a 2% increase.  (A 2% increase is, in effect, a decrease, since our costs rise by about 5% a year.)  The other clear fact here is that Saskatchewan, currently a "have" province, ranks 9th among the provinces in the amount of money it provides to post-secondary education.  It is unclear whether the Faculty of Arts is being asked to take more of a financial hit than other, more profession-oriented faculties.  I am hoping that Paul Bogdan's excellent piece, "Is this a dagger which I see before me?" in The Carillon and David Fraser's briefer piece in the Leader-Post will shake down some answers to our questions.
• Chris Hedges believes, as do a number of people I respect, that governments are attempting to "silence" or "starve" the humanities and the social sciences because we're the ones who teach the troublemakers--if we aren't troublemakers ourselves.  We ask the uncomfortable questions.  We don't take the government or corporate line for granted, nor do we share their vision of "prosperity"--that it is synonymous with "profit." We don't believe that the lives and the societies and the environments they have in mind for us are either the best or the only possibilities.

This fall, just before the term began, the English Department met to consider the budgetary realities, and I found myself saying that critical thought, the arts, cultural institutions, and the natural world that so beautifully supports our existence, are hanging on "by the skin of our teeth."  My memory queried that phrase the minute it was out of my mouth.  It came from somewhere memorable.

It's the title of the first chapter of Kenneth Clark's Civilization, the one that describes the dark ages between the fall of Rome and "The Great Thaw" that began, from his perspective, in 1100 C.E.  I nodded inwardly, realizing that we are heading, possibly world-wide, toward a twenty-first-century Dark Age, one where the barbarian hordes are those who believe that profit and wealth are the only true "good," in spite of the fact that the economists of happiness and the cognitive psychologists will tell them that their hunger can never be assuaged.  So I went back to Kenneth Clark's book, and found both some disturbing parallels and some hope. 

First, the devout St. Gregory burned countless volumes of the Classical literature we had inherited from Greece and Rome because they "seduced men's minds away from the study of holy write" (17).  He is the precursor, then, of ideologues who want to silence dissent and free thought.  On the other hand, there was Charlemagne, who, with the "help of an outstanding teacher and librarian named Alcuin of York...collected books and had them copied....Our whole knowledge of ancient literature is due to the collecting and copying that began under Charlemagne" (18).

I don't find despair exactly energizing.  At any given moment, it is probably as rational to say the glass is half empty as to assert that it's half full, and I fully respect this fact.  So I choose to take the "half full" view, even though sometimes it's initially quite a struggle.  In part, that means teaching with all the passion and joy I can muster, because for every politician or CEO who's on the wrong track, I can touch an Arts student who can reflectively maneuver us onto the right track. In part, it means looking out my window as I work, taking in the beauty of the natural world, thinking about my daughter's photograph of the church in King's Lynn on Ascension Sunday and about the potters who made the jars that unceremoniously hold pens and clips.  The natural world always reminds me that there's something bigger than myself, something as beautiful as anything humans have ever made.  So I also drive to work through the park, making my left turn off Albert at the Legislature and taking the long way in along the lake, where the geese still have a bit of open water they gather around and where the opposite shoreline is often shrouded in fog.  It means taking a different route through the park on the way home where I almost always see a rabbit out for for "silflay."  In the words Kenneth Clark uses to describe the wonderful Unicorn Tapestries, "nature goes on naturing."

In some ways, I keep hope alive by writing this blog, by finding a place where literally no one stands between you and me.  It means, unfortunately, trying to ignore the fact that Candace Savage won the Hillary Weston Non-fiction prize for a book published by Greystone, and imprint of the now-bankrupt and restructuring Douglas and McIntyre publishing firm.  That, in turn, makes me think of book stores...and forces me to take a deep breath before I spiral down yet again.

It makes me want to spend time with creative writers, as I will be doing on Saturday when the English Department hosts a Creative Writing Open House.  Creative people are the only ones who can get us out of this.  That's not only because they are the ones who will entertain us on the improbably dark nights that are ahead or who can make history live in our memories so we know where human progress left off.  They are the ones who will help us be subversive, if not the ones who come up with the solutions.  But more than that:  creative people know the joy of making something, not simply buying it.  They can't be bought off.

Music for an empty house

I have revised and revised and edited and revised the talk I am giving tomorrow on Woolf's aesthetics as they are revealed to us by the form of To the Lighthouse and by Lily Briscoe's painting.  I have spent considerable time on the last paragraph, of course, because late on a Friday afternoon, in the part of the term when people are very tired by the end of the week, I need not only to write a logical conclusion--difficult enough!--but to get the cadence of the words to say what I can only partially articulate. 

I am not happy with the last couple of sentences. I am trying to describe one of the paradoxes of art:  that in its humility, its uncertainty about its place in our private and civic lives, in its refusal to lay literal claims to us, in its desire to engage us in conversation, not to harangue us, it gains a kind of oxymoronic powerless power.  I have scoured my rather good thesaurus.  Do you have any idea of the extent to which power is associated with potency, powerlessness with impotence?  Words are going in the wrong direction altogether.

 So I came home to dine alone, since Bill is in Saskatoon for a meeting early tomorrow morning.  During the renovations we did not have our stereo, so now I am rediscovering music.  There was a CD I still hadn't played, recommended by my sister, Karen:  Arvo Part's "Alina."  There are five sections, the first third and fifth played by piano with violin or cello, the second and fourth by the piano alone.  The melodies are starkly simple, the accompaniment broken chords that aren't always pretty or predictable.  The solo piano interludes speak to me most powerfully.  Haunting, simple harmonies are played with a tentativeness that suggests how fragile beauty is, how tender our connection with time, how uncertain our grasp of what we feel. This is perfect music for an empty house, echoing in its space the way it echoes in our minds, with the mystery of its simplicity and restraint.

Hoping that Part wrote them for a person or an occasion that will explain their haunting quality, I turned to the liner notes to find nothing but a musicologist's meditation on Part's original voice.  But in tiny italics there was this:   "I could compare my music to white light which contains all colours.  Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener."

This metaphor would have suited Woolf perfectly.  The last chapter in my study of her aesthetics (not written yet) will be on her sense of the reader as a co-creator, the reader as an important part of art's integrity.  For it is readers thinking for themselves that, in her words "presses the weight of their consciousness" upon the writer, urging her on, being frank when she's being lazy, giving her a sense of her culture's anxieties, joys, pleasures, fears.  But it is perhaps even more importantly the writer who leaves suggestive spaces between her thoughts who makes the work that softly commands our attention.

The generosity of book launches

I am back in the thick of teaching and of all the marking that comes with writing classes, so I only went to two of this fall's panoply of book launches.  Is it even reasonable to draw some conclusions from two launches?  Well, I shall do it nevertheless, since I've seen the change coming for quite some time.  Book launches now are not simply an occasion for the writer to preen herself or himself over the delights of the printed book and keep people listening to a reading for longer than is otherwise conscionable.  The new launch is likely to include an interview (as did Britt Holmstrom for her book of elegant stories, Leaving Berlin); there might be music or other readers.  The new book launch includes conversations and is more generous and less single-minded.

In September, Brenda Schmidt launched her book of essays, Flight Calls:  An Apprentice on the Art of Listening, a book she worked on when she was writer in residence at Mackie Lake House, and published by Kalamalka Press.  The launch took an unusual format.  Brenda read, briefly, from her introduction, which described her first meeting with Gerry Hill, who was to become her SWG  mentor.  Then Gerry had some observations and favourite moments from the book that he used to try to get a conversation going between Brenda and himself.  Sometimes they cooked.  Sometimes Gerry's questions seemed a little hermetic for an author nervously launching a book.  I should also say that his voice twines through Flight Calls itself, since each essay has an epigraph sent by him, and a long letter from Brenda to Gerry winds in and around the creative process and among Brenda's careful observations of the natural world.

Flight Calls is certainly about listening, beginning and ending as it does with Brenda's concerns about her own hearing.  It is infused with birdsong, the sound wind makes in different kinds of trees, the hum of her computer, the song "Trees," sung by 256 women in which they name 81 different kinds of trees.  Brenda writes "The other day I listened to it while looking out the window.  I pictured 256 women singing among the trees, 256 clouds of breath rising.  The daydream fell away in seconds.  The trees came forward.  The naked crowns of poplar and birch, lilac and maple, the tangle of spirea and caragana, the leaning spruce, the beheaded spruce" (105).  But Flight Calls is as much about vision and vision's uncertainties and celebrations.  Brenda and her husband Harvey are avid birders who play host to ptarmigan, who participate in citizen science by keeping bird counts.  One winter day they find a Rustic Bunting in the trees near the feeder.  This is a bird that summers in Scandinavia or Siberia and winters in China--definitely off course in northern Creighton SK in February.  Brenda and Harvey post their siting, photographs, and video on the internet and play host to 27 birders, watching the bunting look sadder and sadder.  They last see him on the day they leave to attend the funeral for Harvey's dad.

There's nothing trickier, it seems to me, than identifying birds, particularly those on the wing.  Birding, then, is a test of the limits of the visual; you're sometimes given little more than a split second to take in the details and compare those with drawings and photographs in books.  Back and forth you go between book and bird, bird and book.  In so many ways, then, Brenda's book speaks of the rich web of connections between vision and the natural world that seems, in Kant's terms, to be especially designed for our very abilities to see.  Cognitive psychologists are telling us that we are more generous when we're in a natural setting; Brenda's book, then, speaks of the generosity of seeing and meditating on the natural world, the remarkable visual richness that world gives back to us.  I certainly recommend you read it.

My second launch this year was of Coby Stephenson's book of linked stories Violet Quesnel.  This too was an unconventional launch.  Coby said she wanted to give something back to the communities that had supported her, so invited a number of people to read.  Hosted by the very funny Devin Pacholik (who opened with what I suspect was a kind of found poem of the reality TV programs we were missing because we were there), it included readings by young poets Cassidy McFadzean and Courtney Bates.  I must confess a kind of maternalistic pride here:  all three of these young people took classes with me, and though I certainly never think of myself as having contributed something "significant"(those are ironic quotes, not scare quotes) to their work, I like to think I at least created a congenial space for experimenting, wondering, thinking about creativity and its seeming inexhaustability.  For this was what I felt, particularly when Cassidy and Courtney and Coby read:  that these young voices are adventurers at the outer edges of language and thought, writing highly unconventional sonnets or updating fairy tales in really intriguing ways.  Allison Kydd also read from her intriguing New Leaf book, Emily via the Greyhound Bus.

Coby, I think, spent more time thanking people than reading the first story about her central character, Violet Quesnel, who "just happens to have bi-polar disorder."  Herein lies another kind of generosity:  the refusal of the creative artist to judge, label, pigeonhole.  Coby has clearly tried through the collection to present bi-polar disorder as simply one of the many interesting facets of Violet's adolescence and early adulthood. Two things stand out about "The First Time."  One is Coby's interesting use of second person narration, implicating the reader in the story, as if we understand Violet's frame of mind:  "You didn't sleep again because the 1984 edition of Funk & Wagnall's encyclopedias, which your mother earned by shopping at Safeway, distracted you.  You have read up to Volume C.  You leave off at court cupboard and you are already dressed for the day because you didn't undress" (9).  The second is her willingness to look Violet's mental illness in the eye and be undaunted by it as a writer:  "These days it hurts for her to try.  To try what?  Just to try.  It feels like she has swallowed a stone.  Perhaps that heavy feeling will make it easier to sink to the bottom of Lake Superior.  Even the fine hairs on her chin feel heavy.  She worries that one day she'll slow down so much that even blinking will cease" (16). Read Coby Stephenson's Violet Quesnel too.

So. The generosity of mentors, of birders who allow other birders into their lives to see a "rarity."  The generous use of language that takes us into the writer's world and allows us to huddle or strut or quietly observe for a while.  The generosity of a newly-published author to give her fellow classmates a chance to share the limelight.  The generosity of acceptance and curiosity.  I don't think this generosity is simply part of the creative attitude or process:  we all know stories of writers who are envious shits. But oh, it is welcome!

The Optimism of Teaching

Canadian designer Bruce Mau begins his essay "Imagining the Future" by observing "I am a designer, which means I cannot afford the luxury of cynicism."  The language is loaded, I know; I'm not sure I would ever suggest that cynicism is a luxury, as if it were some kind of warm, deep bath that we'd all like to immerse our aching bodies in from time to time.  If I could imagine cynicism as something available to our senses, it would be sour lemonade or lukewarm coffee.  All the same, I take his point:  there are some occupations that don't mix well with cynicism.  First, Mau's historical horizon is something he calls the "Long Now."  If we don't make our judgments of the current moment simply based on our impressions of that very moment and the few months leading up to it,  but appreciate the way our own time is simply the crescendo that's been building for quite a number of years, we can see how much life has improved.  As he points out, fewer people in the world are either hungry or sick from preventable diseases; child mortality rates have dropped while life expectancy has grown.  Second, as a designer he solves problems, perhaps with air traffic control systems or with machines that make kidney dialysis possible at home, and there is something inherently optimistic about solving problems and building new things.

I am a teacher, which means I'm not inclined to cynicism:  that's how I'd revise his sentence to fit me.  There must be some cynical people who teach; or people who teach may have parts of their lives that they're cynical about.  I can easily get cynical about politicians and about the whole political process.  I can certainly be cynical about how capitalism is shaking out in the early twenty-first century, particularly when "free (and hopefully unregulated) markets" are touted as the cure for everything.  I'm with Mark Kingwell on this one:  we're happier with more time to reflect, to spend with friends, to form supportive communities than we are with the latest gadget or fashion.  I'm not so much of PollyAnna that I don't realize that some students will try to play me, which is okay because there are natural consequences for missing classes or missing deadlines:  those students won't do well in my class, though the next time I see them in the hallway I'm still a friendly face.  I've just let the universe unfold as it will.

In some ways, it's particular groups of students who inspire my optimism.  Students in writing classes, whether it's "Introduction to Creative Writing" or the seemingly more drab "Expository and Persuasive Writing" always make me feel hopeful.  I've got fourteen remarkable young people in my Expository and Persuasive Writing class, which I I began by telling them that I want them to develop their own "credible voice." This means creating a voice that sounds like them, with its own individual cadence and vocabulary and world view--but that's just the "voice" part.  Being credible also entails paying attention to details like learning to use semi-colons rather than simply and blithely committing comma splices.  Being credible means using precise language and getting your Works Cited page right. They're more than willing to work to achieve this kind of credibility.   In this class, I have students who make films and students who are involved in dance.  I have students who do volunteer work with people with disabilities, but who can see beyond those disabilities to the spirits and wisdom of their clients.  I have students who work at Dojack because it makes them feel good to help others.  I have half a dozen people, at least, who should be in creative writing classes:  so vivid are their ideas about anxiety or happiness or depression.  I have students who are intensely curious about how society works, students involved in the political process.  I also have young people who are simply cheerful and curious.  Every day is an adventure with them, and rather than dreading my marking, I look forward to it:  spending time with their minds and words is an adventure.  How could I not be optimistic about a world where young people care about ideas--about exploring and expressing ideas?

The other class I'm teaching is Jane Austen.  There, my 24 fellow travelers will read 1,663 pages of some of the clearest, most exquisite yet workmanlike prose in English.  They will all write better after they finish the class.  They are curious about the historical period that gave rise to Austen's novels, yet they see that some elements of those novels echo their own circumstances.  Elizabeth Bennet and Catherine Morland and Eleanor and Marianne Dashwood are caught between two ideas of marriage:  the older generation believed that marriage ought to be a contract that improves the position of the family as a whole either economically or socially, while the younger generation hoped to marry for love and companionship.  Similarly, my students are aware of the way in which a particular historical moment limits or shapes the possibilities of their lives.  History isn't something "out there," visible in battles and elections.  The individual is often strangely and inextricably touched by it.

We have just begun Pride and Prejudice, rightly everybody's favourite.  I've taught Austen enough to know that once they've waded through Sense and Sensibility (we begin with Northanger Abbey, which is simply a fun spoof but gets us used to Austen's language and syntax), they seem to simply understand the rules of Austen's plots and worlds.  We proceed mostly with questions and answers, and create a lively conversation in the classroom.  Today, as a prelude to a discussion of the relationship between Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy, we talked about the world views and moral assumptions of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and dear generous Jane. My students are insightful about the way such worldviews blind or betray some of the characters both morally and practically.  Were Austen to suddenly appear in my classroom, ready to chat with them about her novels, she would be delighted with their observations.

The first batch of essays is due in the Austen class tomorrow, so the romance may wane a bit.  I may grit my teeth over paragraphs that aren't coherent or my 23rd comma splice over the last hour.  But I've often thought that it's just as rational to think the glass is half full as to conclude that it's half empty.  That seems about right to me:  there just about as much stupidity and greed and cruelty in the world as their is generosity, curiosity, and happiness.  I'm lucky, though.  My students make it much more difficult to just give in to despair and hopelessness.  Yes, much is wrong with the world, but I see the growth of a generation that is insightful, thoughtful, and compassionate.  I want to spend as much time with them as I can.  Fortunately, they put up with me.

The "Power of We" Blog

I usually climb on my soapbox in what I hope is a sort of sly, sidling movement that the readers of my blog are just learning to detect--and perhaps avoid.  Frankly, I try to soften you up with either beauty or craftsmanship--the pleasant cadence of a well-turned sentence or an evocative image--before I circle back round to the things that matter to me:  beauty, craftsmanship and its satisfactions, all art, all play, the importance of conversation, reflection on our goals--all leavened by my reading and thinking.  But I've found myself doing something rather surprising.  I've joined in "Blog Action Day" in which committed bloggers are writing posts on the theme "The Power of We."  Are all artists independent folks who just want the time and solitude in which to create?  But of course, for me that desire for solitude is mingled with a desire for the kinds of conversations I have with my students, for the kinds of learning both my students and I do during a term's exploration of Jane Austen or creative nonfiction.

Yet my Facebook page and the friends who check in there have certainly changed my behaviour--as has my own sense (seconded by the vision of thinkers and observers like Chris Hedges) that we are possibly facing a twenty-first-century dark age, a time when economies are in tatters, when we try to re-think whether we value wealth or art/conversation/friendship, a time when climate change is threatening the world in which we live and questioning what it is we value:  the profits from oil sent to China or the pristine environment of The Great Bear Rainforest.  Daily I find myself signing petitions or following links to organizations like Leadnow or Ecojustice or to Occupy Regina. 

Using the language of Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, somehow the "hive switch" has been thrown for me.  At this particular historical moment, I do not think I can say, with W.B. Yeats "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" ("The Second Coming").  I am more hopeful.

Right now, the worst that Yeats speaks of are the cynics, those who, in Oscar Wilde's words, "know the price of everything and the value of nothing."  They have the most power; they now dominate the non-conversation about what we value, wherein free, unregulated markets are the answer to every problem.  Do you have common land in Saskatchewan that the Federal Government has given back to you to do with what you please?  Biodiversity and protected habitats are much less important than simply selling this land off to the highest bidder.  Do we know that adequate housing not only saves misery, but saves governments money?  But who will profit?  Are we putting our intelligence into figuring how to get oil to China, which is happy to fuel its own economy?  Why aren't we exploring solar and wind power?  But how can we charge for sunlight and wind?

Most of what we value is what we share in common.  Educational institutions.  Green spaces.  Justice.  Clean air and water. 

In The Righteous Mind, Haidt acknowledges that chimps never cooperate, partly because they can't conceive of or communicate goals they might share, and that we resemble chimps in this respect more than we'd like.  But he also talks about how "the hive switch" can be turned on.  Interestingly, both Haidt and Netta Weinstein, Andrew K. Przybylski and Richard M. Ryan have done interesting work on the way immersion in the natural world leads us to be more generous. Haidt writes "Awe acts like a kind of reset button:  it makes people forget themselves and their petty concerns.  Awe opens people to new possibilities, values, and directions in life.  Awe is one of the emotions most closely linked to the hive switch, along with collective love and collective joy...precisely because nature can...shut down the self, making you feel that you are simply a part of a whole (Haidt 228; italics in original).

On Friday I was talking with one of the students of my Expository and Persuasive Writing class about mob mentalities.  Obviously Haidt's description of the elephant came into my attempt to explain why and how people

Despair and Thanksgiving

Saturday mornings, Bill and I have a comforting, settled routine.  We begin our day as soon as Tangerine opens and take in the spirit of the wonderful jazz they play along with our coffee and scones or hot chocolate and muffins.  Then, because we're only three blocks from the Farmer's Market and because finding parking any closer is difficult and because we've had a miraculous fall, we get our shopping bag out of the trunk and walk up Lorne to market on Twelfth Avenue.  We may not even need very much, but we go anyway  Partly, we simply like the atmosphere:  the friendly, funky, chaotic atmosphere you create when you turn a street into a market space without restrictive aisles.  You have to negotiate other people's paths, which leads to eye contact and smiles.  If I do need anything, I like to buy it as close to home and as low on the capitalist food chain as possible for environmental and political reasons.  I'd rather pay a local farmer I can smile at than an anonymous Mr. Safeway.  Also, we're likely to run into someone we know for a little weekend pinch of sociability.  Gail Bowen and her daughter Wendy are regulars.  Sometimes we see Katherine Arbuthnott leaving as we arrive.  Last weekend we ran into Jennifer Arends and Justin Messner with their new baby, Malcolm.

As we stand in the middle of Twelfth Avenue, letting the market flow on around us like water around a quartet of boulders, it's like being at the still centre of a carnival.  Or of impromptu theatre.  Somehow when you're forced to look someone in the eyes and figure out what path they're on, you're struck by the sense that just that moment you've had a walk-on part in someone else's drama.  Quite often they are quiet dramas:  an older woman trying to figure out how to load her granny cart, a family trying to give a six-year-old some freedom without losing him; an anxious but very hip young couple trying to figure out how they want to live, negotiating what they value as she heads for the organic gardener while he eyes the jam in the stall next door.

Last Saturday morning at Tangerine, I'd been reading Chris Hedges' Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.  I'm a child of the sixties and anti-war and civil-rights marches, so I gave a miss to the chapters that talked about how we got here.  His last chapter, largely on the significance of the Occupy Movement, was what I was curious about, since that movement has winkled its way into Soul Weather.  Hedges argues that we have arrived at an age of ultra-capitalism, when CEOs shape our lives with a defining vision of the developed world:  we will all be making and buying widgets.  We should be educated to provide capitalism with self-sustaining skills and we should buy into the idea that the fulfilment of our lives is to have more stuff than the person next door.  Hedges either sees this vision as a given that no one questions or as a world-wide conspiracy that even President Barack Obama is implicated in.

I know enough people from different walks of life--and I know Althusser's theory of interpellation--that I can easily believe that a distressing number of people (some of them the parents of my students) have accepted this view of the world.  We have all heard too many times that an unfettered, unregulated market will solve all manner of ills.  But the psychological research suggests we seldom derive a sustained sense of well-being (notice I'm avoiding the word 'happiness,' which I think it problematic) from the pursuit of extrinsic goals. If beauty is our ticket to happiness, we will have to face the fact that we age.  If wealth is the lottery ticket we've got in our hands, we're doubtless going to find out that someone else is wealthier.  Fame subsides very quickly in a Twitterverse  always hungry for the next big story; ditto power.  But if what we seek is our own very personal satisfaction in something crafted, some injustice righted, some kindness given, some good food offered, intense and challenging friendships fostered, then a sense of well-being is with our reach.  The caveat, of course, is that you need a modicum of comfort and security before you can turn to these goods.  It is hard for someone on the streets to get inspired by the thought of making a fantastic Thanksgiving dinner for friends, which is one of the Occupy Movement's concerns,. 

But Hedges' sense that in North America at least--and perhaps in much of Europe--capitalism is the order of the day disturbed me as I went about my business.  I looked up from one paragraph to see an older man across the street from Tangerine, just in front of Lorne Drugs, standing next to a car for a full five minutes, looking up and down the street, his chest visibly heaving even from my perspective.  I wondered if he was waiting for the ideal moment to break into the vehicle--and older car that didn't look all that promising--when he opened the passenger's side door, lifted up his respirator and put it in the passenger's seat.  He walked around the car, got into the driver's seat, attached himself to the respirator again and then sat there for another five minutes before driving off.   Was there no one who could have run his errand for him?  Was this his declaration of independence, a deep need to get outdoors in the sunshine on his own to enjoy the last crisp but sunny September Saturday morning?

I have already told you about our visit to the Farmer's Market.  On the way back, in one of the graveled parking lots on Lorne between Fourteenth Avenue and Thirteenth, a lot where I have seen half a dozen rabbits out to nibble weeds in the dusky light, about fifteen people ranging in age from their mid-twenties to their mid-seventies were doing Tai Chi.  It is an unprepossing place for people to join for this meditative practice, but their smooth musical movements didn't suggest that the gravel underfoot and the weeds at the edges of the stalls concerned them at all.

Hedges' powerfully critical generalizations don't take into account the number of us who do our best to live "off the grid," as I have come to put it:  to live outside or on the edges of the capitalist system he derides.  Hedges is not the only writer who depends on over-generalization to make his case.  In his critique of the oil industry and our dependence on oil for the texture of our daily lives, Andrew Nikiforuk has written The Energy of Slaves:  Oil and the New Servitude; as its title would suggest, he argues that we are all enslaved to oil.  Alanna Mitchell, in her review of Nikiforuk's book (I'll admit the review is all I've read),calls Nikiforuk "an impeccable, wide-ranging researcher and prolific writer" and points out the number of significant awards he's won.  All the same, she writes that his basic analysis isn't incorrect, but that the situation "is not as one-sided, as paranoic or as clearly demarcated as he makes it seem.  I fear that just as our society is disfigured by dependence on cheap oil, his analysis is disfigured by rage.  Can you really believe that modern cities are simple human feedlots [for keeping oil's slaves alive]?  It seems to me that there is more here than that.  I look around and see art, joy, neighbourhoods, bookstores, communities, families, gardens, thriving local businesses and parks.  Plus, for the record, people who live in modern industrialized cities use less carbon per person than people who live on farms.  Just saying" (Literary Review of Books October 2012 page 13).

I can see that Nikiforuk's and Hedges' views might be coloured by rage.  I also suspect they are trying to get our attention.  And perhaps even more, their books are tinged with despair which I sometimes share with them, particularly in a time when governments are cutting funds to arts and to universities--the very places and people charged with creating thoughtful solutions.  At the same time, this morning I opened up my Facebook page to find Deborah Morrison's wonderful litany of the people she's grateful for:  from the young man who fixed her furnace to the workers in her mother's care facility who dialed Deb's number so they could have a Thanksgiving conversation, to friends who listen and support and feed.  This, along with my farmers and the group practicing Tai Chi and the man whose mortality is with him daily, create networks of care and creativity and perspective that speak to a very different world than that of oil barons and powerful CEOs.  Perhaps besides being grateful this year, we could all put our own creativity to work and figure out how to make the thankful vision we have a more creative force in our societies.

Who do we create for?

As I worked on my Sunday quota of four blocks for Veronica's quilt, I thought about one aspect of craft that I haven't often reflected on:  that the craftsperson most frequently makes things that will be used in other people's everyday lives.  Although I'm having fun trying to make interesting blocks when faced with Veronica's idea of the quilt she'd like to have on her bed, I am not driven to make this quilt the way I was driven to make the New York Beauty that is now on the spare bed.  I had this theory about colours:  that all colours could go together if they were arranged or grouped in an effective way, if you paid attention less to the colour than to their level of saturation--the amount of black or grey mixed in with a pure colour, and if you created a rhythm of saturated and unsaturated colours.  I made the quilt, then, as a way of learning something I really wanted to know, as an experiment.  It didn't need to satisfy someone else's hunger, to speak to someone else's sense of who they are, the way something beautiful and well-crafted is able to do.

I seem to be managing this with Veronica's quilt; she looked at all the blocks I have pieced and said "That's it.  Understated with a bit of red.  That's me."  And in a way the need to understand someone else's desires and vision is a gift:  it stretches me as a craftsperson beyond my comfort zone.  I find that some of my principles still hold, though in different ways.  Many quilters, for example, talk about encouraging the viewer's eyes to move around the quilt.  What we're trying to do is to build in surprises that urge you to explore, or to build in echoes that you seek out.  I'm still doing that here, but in a way that's much more subtle. I have to intuit what Veronica would like, and that imaginative act is, in itself, exciting.  She's found a cream print with simple grey butterflies and moths on it, and I'm going to "fussy-cut" pieces and make a slight change to the block so that, perhaps three times in the entire quilt, there's a large moth or a butterfly right at the centre of the block.   

Thoughtful craftspeople imagine the person who will use their work all the time.  Randal Fedge, who tried to teach me to work on a potter's wheel, often took the lovely edge of a bowl and gave it a twist with his thumb.  He was anticipating the bowl's owner picking it up right by the comfortable, inviting divot he'd made.  Jack Sures makes inviting thumb-rests on the top of his mug handles.  I have a very flat porcelain bowl made at Chosin Pottery by Judy Dyelle.  She has made a tiny pleat on the edge of the thin porcelain that always makes me smile, perhaps because it made her smile when she created it.  

Thinking about craftspeople making invitations to future users or attempting to anticipate what would give their owners delight made me wonder whether artists do something similar.  Who do artists create for?  Other artists?  Past masters?   I had a chance to put that question to three young writers last weekend.  "Who do you write for?" I asked them.  Sarah Taggart gave an answer that moved me.  She writes for her characters.  Then because she messes it up, she says, she has to go back to write for herself--for her sense of self-respect.  And then for future readers. 

Brenda Schmidt launched a very interesting book of essays, Flight Calls on Monday.  All of these were prompted by rather enigmatic epigraphs sent by her Saskatchewan Writers' Guild mentor Gerry Hill:  clearly at some level she--like many of us--wrote for a mentor who perhaps temporarily comes to stand in for the audience we would like to have, an audience we respect and trust.

Adorno has a lovely phrase about a successful work of art.  He says it is the equal of itself.  In other words, what the artist has accomplished actually comes very close to the artist's vision.  Faulty craftsmanship, a simplistic world view, inattention haven't crept into the work so that it fails to reflect that Platonic ideal the artist had.  I kind of like Adorno''s notion, except that sometimes I suspect I don't grasp that complex ideal until I'm nearly there.  If I could articulate that ideal in words, I wouldn't have difficulty writing the poem or realizing the character, would I?  Yet I still believe that in the early stages I write for the work itself.  There's some complex aesthetic whole which speaks to what it means to be human that I strive for, even if I only imagine it at some level of abstraction.   It's only as I get closer to this hazy idea that I begin to think about how I'll create a bridge between the work and the world I want it to live in.

Autumnal synaesthesia

I enjoy winter.  I find something appealing about the aesthetic minimalism of winter, of a world stripped down to basics.  I suspect I also enjoy the excuse to hibernate, to pare my own life down to the things that are important necessary:  family, cats, friends, reading--all in the "yes" column.  Floundering around on FB or wandering Cornwall Centre after Christmas--not so much.  Baking bread, yes; baking cookies probably not.

But I also love the way fall, with its riotous effect on our senses, gets us ready for that minimalism.  Just before last weekend, I thought that fall was very much about colour and about the way that colour changes daily.  You have to watch carefully, earnestly, or you find that a favourite tree has suddenly lost all its leaves and you didn`t even notice it turning.  The light also changes quickly, particularly in the early evening, so you realize that you need to watch that sunset down the back lane or you`re not going to see it at all.

Fall is, perhaps, the season when all our senses are tangled together.  The sussurating leaves sound golden.  The crisp mornings taste like heirloom tomatoes and freshly pulled carrots. The particular smell of fallen elm leaves evokes also the smell of apples, of fallow earth, of planting tulip bulbs.  You associate the late afternoon golden light with long nineteenth-century novels or with some other mad undertaking like re-reading Dante`s Divine Comedy or the latest translation of The Iliad and The Odyssey.  Strangely enough, paradoxically enough, for those of us who are the perpetual students that teach, it is a season of new beginnings, a time to re-envision an undertaking you`ve been doing for thirty-six years so you can (in Ezra Pound`s words) "make it new" in this time of the turning, waning year.

Craft and Art--again

 

I made Veronica a going-away-to-university quilt when she left for McGill, in 1997.  It's traveled quite a lot, even catching a plane for Cambridge, and has become rather worn and faded.   So she and I had been on the lookout for a quilt or a block or a fabric that would suggest a skeleton for a new quilt that I hope to have finished for Christmas.

Foolishly, while I was on sabbatical I worked on Barbara Brackman's block of the week quilt that marked the 150th anniversary of the civil war.  She created a wonderful website for quilters that included lots of history, photographs of many primary documents, details from women's lives, and information about decisive battles.  Each of the blocks, like one called "the underground railroad," which had a strong visual diagonal, was tied to the war in some way.  Perhaps the block had been published under a particular name, like "the battle of Sumter," in a ladies' magazine.   More than that, perhaps, the naming of quilt blocks after events or songs (there's one called "the grapes of wrath") or ideas shows how close the war was to the domestic lives of women, how it had become a part of their self-expression in quilts. The fabrics Brackman was using for the sample blocks were all made with reproduction fabrics--fabrics designed to look like they might have come from the Civil War period.  Strangely enough, there's a whole cottage industry devoted to "reproduction" fabrics.  I'll admit I can't resist buying them because they're so interesting.  They have a different visual language and a different mood from contemporary cottons.

These two blocks, in a pattern called "blockade" "spoke" to Veronica.  She liked something about the calm square in a square in a square, but also liked the secondary pattern of the pinwheel that emerges when you put the blocks together edge to edge.  The next step was for her to begin to go through my fabric stash to find the beginnings of a colour scheme and the visual language of the fabric she liked.  She decided on blacks, dark blacky-blues, grey blues, greys, creams--and a dash of red.  I've made about fifteen blocks, which you see at the top of the post.  Of course, Sheba had to put herself in the picture.  Where there are quilts or quilt blocks, there are cats--or at least Sheba.  We've chosen lots of batiks along with quite a few Japanese fabrics to give the quilt a modern look.

This weekend, in order to get myself organized to simply sit down and begin to piece, I pulled fabrics for blocks, combining them in groups of fours, and started cutting up perfectly good fabric into little pieces so I could sew them together again--a non-quilter's bemused definition of quilting.  And I studied the blocks I'd made, which were spread out on the quilt that opened last week's post. 

For me, quilting is very much about play.  But I also find that when I am working on a quilt some other layer of my mind rumbles away like a woman's foot on an old treadle sewing machine.  One of the questions that popped up for me, perhaps because I was looking at the juxtaposition of two very different quilts, was "Is there such a thing as a 'Kathleen Wall quilt'?  My immediate answer was 'no.'  Perhaps you could recognize my quilts by the careful craftsmanship and the size of the quilting stitches if I had quilted it by hand.  No matter how many triangles I have to coordinate, all my points meet.  But my quilts share this quality with those of hundred--if not thousands--of quilts made by other women.  I could also say that my quilts aren't what quilters derisively call "matchy-matchy."  If I'm using blue in a quilt, I don't make sure that all the blue fabrics are exactly the same blue, with the same amount of grey or green or purple in them.  I interpret my colours widely.  But again, you could say this of many, many quilters.  While there's something very calm about a quilt whose colours are uniform, lots of quilters chose instead to surprise you into thoughts about colour and mood.  So that the quilt I posted last week uses almost every shade of blue or green there is, trying to create something both harmonious and surprising.

Perhaps, my bubbling mind considered, I've stumbled onto one of those distinctions between craft and art that I'm always thinking about.  Craft, like quilting, is very much concerned with traditions.  Why else would thousands of women around the world (these women included their comments on Brackman's website and sent in pictures of their blocks ) be making quilts in the twenty-first century out of fabric designed to look like it was made in the nineteenth?  Craft also speaks to a collective vision or preoccupation, so we were making blocks that women had designed about a hundred and fifty years ago when they wanted to articulate the connections between their intimate and domestic lives and large historical events.

You could catch the glimpse of one of Van Gogh's paintings and know that it was a Van Gogh.  Likewise, you could probably identify a couple of sentences as Shakespeare's or Virginia Woolf's.  But this is not always true of craft.  We expect artists to express their unique vision of the world, of life, of our experience of being human,  a vision that colours every aesthetic decision they make.  Certainly some people who are working in media that we usually associate with "craft," like ceramics, nevertheless bring their own vision of their practice and their world into everything they create.  But we call them artists.

I could think of my quilts as studies in mood--which is also how I think of Mark Rothko's paintings.  But he has found an entirely original, idiosyncratic, challenging way of embodying mood, while I use the visual language that women have spoken time time out of mind.  Together we create two things all human beings need to thrive:  the unfamiliarity, the challenges, the questions posed by the work of art, and the comfort of the familiar, of tradition. 

Early Fall: Only a Promise of Happiness

In his book Only a Promise of Happiness, art critic Alexander Nehemas suggests that one of the promises beauty makes is that it will repay our attention.  We have the sense, he argues, that we can return to something beautiful over and over and never exhaust what it might tell us about the human body, about the natural world, about the expression of an emotion or an idea, about the creation of form or the perfect correspondence between form and content.  Perhaps he explains my own watchfulness over the last couple of days as summer draws to its ecstatic, golden ending and as I move from the isolation of writing back into the community and conversation of the classroom.

Mornings are different:  there's a relieved, happy tang in the air that is reflected in people's spirits and in the wind.  Saturday morning after our weekly breakfast at Tangerine, Bill and I walked from there to the Farmer's Market.  The wind laughed and tumbled a piece of newspaper along Thirteenth as if its tattered edges were made of crinoline.  People had come with their wagons, their children, their granny carts to the market where we are both more sociable--catching one another's eyes in shared delight in a child's determined march across the park--yet sometimes less aware of one another as we turned inward to recover our shopping lists or simply feel the air on our skin.   This is nothing like our decorous shopping in the supermarket where we move down the aisles in straight lines, respecting one another's sense of purpose and avoiding one another's faces and shopping carts.  There is simply something about the ripeness in the air--the fragrance of tomatoes and falling leaves--that captures our enlivened attention.

The mid-day heat is also different, Janus-faced.  It looks back to  summer, but its dryness and its promise of cool evenings face the fall.  Even on these warm afternoons, there's no fooling yourself into believing that it's midsummer.  Perhaps that's because the trees sound different; they rub their dry edges against one another the way an old woman rubs the dry palms of her hands.  Our hot humid summer created a landscape that was boldly, brilliantly green.  But gold has crept into the palette.  You may look up on a country road to find an entire field swathed onto its side, the grain gone, the straw inert; it no longer cares about the wind or the sun.  Golden fields on both sides of the road wrap you in the warmth you will need for the winter ahead.   Or you may find a sudden streak of yellow through the small birches in Wascana Park or see a single branch of an elm turned golden.  No matter how much water you give your lawn, it won't return to that pure midsummer green.

There's an openness about the house, now that we no longer close the windows and the curtains against heat that won't abate in the night.  Yet that openness comes with a strange price:  the tapping of the blinds against the window frames sounds like time itself, with its uneven rapping on my knuckles.  My first inclination is to rush headlong into time, and I make lists furiously; then I refuse to hurry the moment and nevertheless find that everything on my list is done.  Am I getting sensible and realistic in my old age, managing my relationship with time in a way that is both friendlier and more productive?  The contradictions won't resolve themselves.

I am intensely here, here right now.  Yet at the same time I have a powerful sense of a past that won't return and of a waning future.  Perhaps there are simply practical reasons for this.  I have finished my last sabbatical and on Thursday I begin my final four years of teaching.  I so look forward to conversations with my students, to the adventure of the classroom.  Yet I also find myself keeping a list of things I'll read and do once I've retired.  Perhaps even more, for my work on Woolf has thoroughly worn me out while it has also filled me with wonder, I look forward to when I'm not juggling contradictory demands on my time.

But these practical changes coming in my life do not explain why the golden light of early evening fills me with quiet delight and deep sadness.  I cannot help studying it with the kind of sustained attention Nehemas tells us we need when we are faced with beauty.  Yet somehow it manages to stare me down, to confront me with its waning, as if it is reminding me that it is only a "promise of happiness," as Stendhall noted in his book On Love, from which Nehemas borrowed his title.  I am indeed in love with life, yet that later afternoon goldness seems to speak of the fact that I will never study it long enough to exhaust my sense of its beauty--which is why I need to pay such careful attention now.