A Week with the Liberal Arts

Monday, January 13, 2013
I needed to give my Honours and Graduate students some context for understanding the importance of George Eliot's last novel, Daniel Deronda--also the only novel she set in the time of her writing.  Her biographer, Frederick R. Karl writes that "Her approach to Deronda in these final months indicates she saw it as her most significant, and perhaps final, statement in fictional terms.  She had located all of her voices, all of her beliefs, and all of her strategies for composition, especially in the juxtaposition of opposing elements, and she had resolved them in a renewal of spiritual beliefs."  That seems to me a lot to hope to accomplish, with any confidence, in a single work.  So I thought we needed to get back to first principles.  What is a novel at the end of the nineteenth century?  Again, the question is too big, but just manageable.

The novel, I told them, is about common people--unlike myths or fairy tales or epics or Romances. We thought about the vast array of characters Eliot collects here--from knights to artists to middle-class families of women trying to keep body and soul together by drawing and doing needlework to Jewish pawnbrokers.  Toward the end of the nineteenth century, particularly after the passage of the Forster Education Act, the values of such a disparate group of individuals is diverse and conflicting.  The class system is in flux; consequently, heroes and heroines make themselves up as they go along.  There seems to be more promise of freedom in the air, yet even in an atmosphere that gestures toward the "modern," characters can suddenly find themselves smack up against limitations and social proscriptions.

What followed was a lively discussion of some of the main characters--Daniel himself, Gwendolen Harleth, and the evil Grandcourt.  The challenge for me was not allowing students' "first impressions" to go unquestioned:  in this novel Eliot put so much energy into exploring the characters' complex motivations that it is a travesty to lapse into certainty or put labels on characters.  Interestingly, the only character of whom this is not true is Grandcourt, who is consistently described as unimaginative.  In one of her final descriptions of him, Eliot notes that "There is no escaping the fact that want of sympathy condemns us to a corresponding stupidity" (509-10).  In contrast, Daniel tells his mother that "What I have been most trying to do for fifteen years is to have some understanding of those who differ from myself" (540).

While trying to read Daniel Deronda twice over the Christmas break was a bit of a stretch, it seems like the perfect place to begin our exploration of the novel for the 50 years the bridge the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.  For what does the novel itself do, but to help us "have some understanding of those who differ from myself"?

Tuesday, January 14, 2013
Earlier in the term when I'd talked to my first-year students about poetry, they'd revealed that finding the "message" in a poem was often frustrating.  This notion that any literature or art has a "message" was one that I wanted to put to rest quite quickly, so I asked them to describe what it's like to be reading something you're so immersed in that you look up and are surprised to see where you actually are.  Beatific smiles flashed across several students' faces; they didn't at all mind talking about the delights and surprises of that kind of reading experience.

So when we began to read Margaret Atwood's "Death by Landscape," I suggested that the author didn't have a message but rather wanted us to have an experience along with Lois, the character whose best summer friend disappeared while on a canoeing trip.  "What's it like to be sitting on a rock with your back to your friend, to hear a shout, and to find her gone?  How would that change your view of the world?"  "What's it like to have someone accuse you of having pushed her off the cliff?  How does that affect the rest of your life?"  "How does such a disappearance affect your relationship to nature?"  Towards the end of the class, we moved from the central story of the camping trip Lois and Lucy take when they are 13, out into the narrative frame of Lois's life after her children have moved out and her husband has died.  She lives in a condo that keeps nature at one remove:  the plants are in pots and she can only see the landscape that's far away.  She can't even hear the wind.  Yet she has a whole wall of small Group of Seven paintings.  I left them with a question for Thursday:  Do those paintings help Lois in any way to understand Lucy's disappearance?

Thursday, January 16, 2013
My first-year students had some remarkable thoughts about how the paintings play a role in Lois's life.  They noted that both the paintings I'd shown them on Tuesday and Atwood's descriptions of those Lois owns are layered:  there's a tangled foreground, and then a mysterious background that seems to hide things--like Lucy.  They express the mystery of Lucy's death, one student thought.  Another said that they help her grieve by keeping the memory of Lucy always present.  Wonderful fights broke out.  Well not really, but there were disagreements--which made me smile, of course.  Because the real question for Lois is where Lucy is.  On the one hand, she can't simply have disappeared; on the other, she remains at the centre of Lois's sense of who she is and how she relates to the world.  So they tried to imagine how works of art could express those contradictions between remembering Lucy, suggesting where she might be, and articulating her absence.

I handed out their next two assignments and explained my expectations; it seems to me easier for students to write well if they understand what the assignment is trying to teach them to do.  At one point, I talked about three formal vocabularies.  One is jargon:  language used, in essence, to say "I'm smarter than you are."  Writers who use jargon aren't really trying to communicate.  A second is legitimate specialized vocabularies.  What if we didn't have words like "metaphor" or "depression"?  How would we communicate these ideas?  A third is  "How I think the professor wants me to sound."  I urge them to avoid the syntax and vocabulary associated with this style.  "Express good ideas clearly and you will sound formal," I told them.

Next I introduced Earle Birney's "David," another death by nature narrative, so we can start it next Tuesday.  One of my keen students asked "Is Birney using jargon when he uses words like "arete," "pika," "bergschrund," and "serac"?  How will I convince them next week that Birney is using language that is remarkably precise, language that suggests we know or understand the ways of mountains, which the poem itself clearly queries?  How will I explain Kant and the sublime?  They get their heads around quite a number of things that I certainly can't conceive of, so I may have difficulties finding a way to explain this mid-twentieth-century idea of nature as a dangerous unknown.  I also have the sense that my students might tire of paradoxes and contradictions by the end of the term.

Thursday afternoon
I moderated a presentation given by Dr. Ken Coates about the Future of the Liberal Arts Education.  Dr. Coates is currently the Canada Research Chair in Regional Innovation at the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy.  He's an historian who has turned to university administration, serving as Dean of Arts and Science at the University of Saskatchewan and Dean of the College of Arts at the University of Waterloo. He gave us, in essence, a terrifying pep talk.  It seems true that we now have to justify the liberal arts; in times of economic uncertainty, students are eager to pursue professional degrees.  It is also true that governments across Canada and around the world are investing less in post-secondary education.

But the most meaningful moment came when Dr. Coates talked about being asked to justify the liberal arts and did so with a kind of thought experiment.  "Take a piece of paper and write down the ten things that worry you at night before you go to bed.  Turn it over and write down the ten things that give you joy or pleasure.  Now cross anything off either list that isn't illuminated or created by the liberal arts."  And of course, there's that "aha" moment, for most of us realize that there isn't anything on those lists that we are inclined to cross off.  He argues that we need to have more faith in ourselves.  But we also ought to be building bridges with high schools and employers.  We should also make at least some of our research speak directly to the wider world, something the Faculty of Arts is trying to do in a variety of ways. 

Friday, January 18, 2013
I'm trying to prepare Monday's Honours/Graduate class today so that I can free up Monday for preparing my first-year class, and hence empty Wednesday for research.  Finding the rhythm of a term when it changes every 13 weeks is always a challenge, but when it means you have a day to concentrate on the ideas and the literature that feeds your soul, it's worth it.  I've not taught Daniel Deronda before, so I continue to read secondary material about it.  Today before making Monday's lecture notes (which I will have to finish Sunday when Bill is watching the Superbowl semi-final games), I read "Daniel Deronda:  A New Epistemology" by George Levine.  Levine begins by reminding us that one of the challenges left to us by the Enlightement, which promised (among other things) that if we observed the world carefully we could understand it, is the difficulty of moving outside one's own viewpoint.  Levine writes "Disinterest and objectivity are always impossible and always necessary....[But] detachment is an aspiration rather than an achievement."

This problem makes its way into George Eliot's wonderfully sympathetic and ethical novels by asking "How is it mentally and morally possible to know others without imposing on them the distorting desires of the aspiring self (without which there would have been no particular reason to understand the 'other' in the first place)?" (Levine 59).  Levine argues that Daniel is the character who is most gifted at this process of understanding others, and that again and again Eliot's narrator attributes sympathy to Daniel's every interaction with people.  It is as if Levine has picked up where I left off my first lecture, noting (after Terry Eagleton), that the novel is the genre whose very raison d'etre in the nineteenth century is to take us into the lives of others so that, attracted by intriguing people and unpredictable but inviting plots, we can understand the lives of people entirely unlike ourselves.

We have a kind of mise en abyme here or a set of Russian dolls.  The point of the liberal arts is both to query how we know the world and its inhabitants and to provide us with more self-conscious ways of understanding and constructing such knowledge.  In turn, we study novels which, psychologists tell us, allow us to 'rehearse' being someone else in situations completely unlike our own.  And then comes Daniel Deronda, where the evil character, Grandcourt, in spite of his wealth, is consistently described as "unimaginative." In contrast, Daniel, who has no distinct social place in nineteenth-century Britain as the abandoned child of an opera singer, is valued for the sympathy he brings to every encounter. 

Minimalism revisited

In spite of the fact that Mies van Der Rohe's dictum that “less is more” was uttered in 1959, the fifties were not a very minimalist time in my home. Perhaps the very fact that he felt the need to offer this piece of advice for designers and decorators is related to the historical moment with its postwar boom built at least partly on consumption of things we didn't, strictly speaking, need, but things which must have met some aesthetic hunger, no matter how ill-informed. The boom, combined with my mother's desire to move solidly (if fictitiously) into the middle class, meant this was a time when things were important. For my wealthier aunts, more was more, a condition my mother aspired to, though we never went in for doilies or knickknacks. My mother's watchword might have been elegance: an octaganal class plate, a very tasteful Madonna with fragile hands. Her living room and dining room were painted a complicated shade of grey: I still remember how hard it was to find carpet to match. 

But the pride she took in things was unmistakable in how she arranged a table or decorated a Christmas tree with nothing but blue lights or in her knowledge of which colours were in style. For my part, I painted, sanded, painted, steel-wooled, and painted a small white bookshelf that has just recently moved to my daughter's apartment. It held the books I'd been given every Christmas and birthday (sometimes by one of the wealthier, more educated aunts). But I had begun to frequent a small shop in the street behind Grand Rapids' main shopping avenue. My allowance bought me pairs or trios of tiny porcelain deer, rabbits, cairn terriers, and once a tiny Tinkerbell with the thinnest wings.

Half a block down the street from my home was St. Joseph's Seminary, surrounded by urban forest. Here, play was simple. You climbed the trees to spy on the seminarians walking two by two in their swinging black cassocks, talking of meaning, talking of the spiritual, the ineffable. Or you made “forts” in the shrubs. While forts for girls could sometimes be surprisingly domestic, with bits of carpet or a plastic tea set, these were not. They were made only of talk and curiosity. In a time when TV and movies romanticized the sexual unavailability of the priest, we were curious about their talk and about the apparent simplicity of their lives which involved the same clothes worn day after day, an old crennelated building, and lots of reading. What would such a life be like? In turn, the seminarians found girls hanging out of trees amusing, and perhaps even as puzzling as we found them. 

When I visit museums or galleries that attempt to give us a glimpse of the decor of the late fifties or early sixties, it see this kind of tension between too much and too little.  The lava lamp is perhaps the synecdoche for this contradiction between my mother`s elegant grey walls and the fussy Madonnas, between my carefully-sanded white bookshelf and the scattered menagerie frolicking there.

The  toe-in-the-water minimalism of the fifties and sixties makes a kind of historical sense to me.  There was, as I have suggested, the post-war boom, which has given me my favourite recipe for  bread--bread that has everything you hadn`t been able to put in it during the war, things like milk and butter.  But there were also the edicts of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, as well as the desire for a kind of space-age sleekness.

But unless I`m in some kind of denial, I don`t fully understand my yearning for minimalism now.  My closets get emptier, more and more boxes go off to Community Living.  I feel a week isn`t complete unless I`ve taken something out of my house and parked it in front of the AdHum elevators, or passed on a book to someone whom I knew would like it.  My most recent clothing purchase is two white cotton shirts, which make me think about Bogart and Bacall in Key Largo, the Bogart movie with the simplest, most essential, unpretentious wardrobe worn by them both:  khaki pants and white shirts.  

--b

 Consciously I know that I`m getting ready for the big move in ten or fifteen years time when I may find the stairs difficult, but that doesn`t explain the aesthetic pleasure minimalism gives me.  I`m working some minimalism into the way I spend time, choosing to meditate or even (pretend to) nap.  Not doing, but simply being seems like a minimalism essential to my life at this point of busy classes, crisis in the academy, being 62 and reaching toward some important decisions about how much longer I will work or how I will pare down my life and give it a shape that is both meaningful and serene.  I suspect that unconsciously I`m getting myself ready for an even bigger move, that there is some calm leaning toward death, wanting the rehearsal of being less encumbered, wanting for the last twenty years of my life to be deliberate about saying `this stays; this matters`and `that goes; it`s getting in the way.`

Looking back and trying to look forward

During the academic year, I am often out of the house before 8 in the morning, finding that the first few hours in my quiet office are the most productive.  So during the holidays, it has been a treat to begin my mornings sitting in front of a lit Christmas tree with only my reading light on, watching the blackness outside turn blue before winter appears out my window.  I drink my coffee and read Daniel Deronda.  Occasionally I simply stop to look at the Christmas tree and let my mind wander toward the new year while Twig parks himself on the top of the sofa cushion behind me so that I can sometimes rest my head in the curve of his neck and listen to his purr. 

I have spent the last couple of days reflecting on the past year and trying to think my way through the next one.  It has been a frustrating, disheartening task.  This is in part because the academic year, since I returned from my idyllic sabbatical, has been dominated and even at times overshadowed by attempts of the central administration, the Faculty of Arts, and the Department of English to plan for funding to the University of Regina to be cut 3% a year, possibly for the next three years.

I have been teaching for thirty-six years, and am watching an institution to which I've given my life--the idea of the university, not simply the U of R--attempting to transform itself into a professional school.  What has happened to the university's commitment to ideas, curiosity, engagement, a sense of life's complexity, and a sense that one individual's confusion and passion have been experienced countless times before by others and that there are at least some reliable questions one might ask?  Parents and politicians--and hence students--are  now convinced that familiarity with the world's ideas and questions are less important than a definite job at the end of four years.  What has happened to the process of finding oneself, to spending four years thinking about self and world and how those two things might relate to one another?  What has happened to adventure?  Does one really know at 18 that one wants to become a petroleum engineer?  And what happens when there are no more jobs for petroleum engineers, when we have all bought electric cars and the oil supply has collapsed?  Does that engineer know how to live, how to adapt, how to find a new purpose?

Human beings don't plan very well.  We are particularly bad at planning on the long term, and even worse when our planning should take the needs of others into account.  We can see that this failure is endemic in Canada.  Not protecting the environment, but rather considering how we can best benefit financially in the immediate future from selling mineral rights is not effectively planning for the future or for future generations.  Not finding a way to improve the lives of our Aboriginal peoples is certainly not thinking long term or of others.  Allowing the divide between the wealthy (and even the comfortable) and the poor to increase is not planning for the future, because such a future is likely to involve rebellion or push-back of some kind.  Taking money out of education, which is the best predictor of health, and putting it into health care is certainly not planning for the future.  Putting money into the health care needed by people living on the street rather than housing them is not a long-term solution.  I have a sense that our leaders are not willing to take the long-term solutions because the short-term response at the ballot box might challenge their views and their actions.  But what are leaders for?  Did we elect them just so they could do whatever it takes to get themselves re-elected?

In the face of these failures, I have felt that the university (as an idea) provided a place to reflect, that its many disciplines provided a variety of perspectives from which to consider the challenges of the present historical moment.  In the Twitterverse, pundits and gad-flies and politicians attempt to provide immediate answers; politicians in particular are hampered by the society's expectation that they not to waffle or change course. The university moves at a more human pace; here the only expectation is that we not simplify, that we don't ignore evidence, that we don't assume that a single individual has enough perspectives to see the challenges of a new problem or the potential implicit in change in all its complexity.  If politics is the story of individuals attempting to put their stamp on the future, the university (again, as an idea) is about a community's commitment to reflection, to complexity, to conversation rather than edict.

I'm not sure we can plan with the idea of long-term student needs in mind.  Our administration has argued that more students are demanding professional or pre-professional programs like petroleum engineering or marketing.  Yet we are told that student engagement is down--perhaps because professional programs do not prompt the kind of engagement required by Fine Arts, Arts, and Sciences.  Professional programs are focused on an end product--the piece of paper that leads to a degree and a secure job--not the journey.  I wouldn't suggest that students enrolled in the professional faculties like Nursing or Engineering are not thoughtful; I would suggest that a cultural language devoted to destinations rather than journeys, a cultural preoccupation with jobs rather than lives is skewing their expectations and perhaps their curiosity.  What happens when the university has built an infrastructure of programs and professors only to find that times have changed?  As Ezra Pound once said,  "Literature is news that stays news."  The same is true of history, philosophy, and all the sciences, though each of these disciplines is also attuned to change, to revolution.  Indeed, they are committed to making that change.

Behind the Christmas tree, the sky has turned an improbable pink, and occasionally I can hear the falling needles clink against a glass Christmas ornament, providing the perfect setting for my sad contemplation of my own future.  I have loved teaching this term.  At the same time, the endless meetings and crises have been exhausting.  Hence I'm faced with the conflict between "duty to self" and "duty to others" that Austen exposes so well in Sense and Sensibility.  What is happening to universities all over the world is breaking my heart. If I were simply thinking of my own well-being, I would retire in 2014.  I've found myself on the edge of this decision numerous times in the last months, only to step back.  Because the truth is that I will not be replaced.  The credibility and practicality of the  English Department's Creative Writing program in particular will be questioned.  Yet I feel that it is creative people that our society needs at this moment.  Yet if I continue to teach, what will I do with my own creativity, which is hobbled and hampered by an atmosphere so tense and fraught?

Well, I'll go back to reading Daniel Deronda, Eliot's last novel, wherein she considers what one might call the ethics of identity.  Both Daniel and Gwendolyn Harleth wonder who they are:  their dogged and passionate posing of that question leads them to consider a whole range of ethical choices they must make.  Eliot won't give me any answers, but she'll suggest a way of thinking things through.  It is, perhaps, the questions that count, though they don't make one comfortable or self- satisfied.  That is, perhaps, the best way to begin a new year. 

Jane Austen's Persuasion and Academic Freedom

Jane Austen's final novel, Persuasion, is my favourite.  I might think Pride and Prejudce the most skilfully built (though I only think this in certain moods); I might concede that Emma is an astute attempt at psychology that involves the reader in an interestingly conflicted relationship with the too-privileged Miss Woodhouse.  But Persuasion is the most visual of Austen's novels; its autumnal notes are fully present to our inner eyes.  It also has a rather startling heroine in Anne Eliott, a woman in her later twenties who, unlike so many of Austen's unfortunate heroines, decides to take her fate into her own hands.  It's the most egalitarian of Austen's novels; the gentlemen from the British Navy turn out to be more principled, more domestic, more sensitive and humane than the landowners who have been living beyond their means, have failed to play leading roles in their communities, and only seek social connections based on status.

But I would also argue that it's Austen's most philosophical novel.  Austen's work is firmly situated between the Enlightenment and Romantic eras:  although she wrote what appear to be courtship novels, she was more concerned with development of her heroine's abilility to think clearly about and judge her conduct, her preconceptions, and her society.  We see this most dramatically in Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth Bennet reads and re-reads Darcy's post-proposal letter, cross-referencing it with what she has observed and what she has ignored and what is probable in Darcy's account of Wickham's life and her family's unconventional (and not very proper) behaviour, finally uttering "Until this moment I have never known myself!"  In a way that also echoes Austen's engagement with the Enlightenment, the word "persuasion" recurs over and over in her last novel, allowing us to see persuasion in all its manifestations and to consider what role it plays in our civil lives. 

The first kind of persuasion Austen explores is a kind of top-down variety.  Seven years before the novel opens, Anne Eliott had been persuaded by Lady Russell to give up her engagement to Captain Wentworth, because he "had nothing but himself to recommend him."  Wentworth is convinced he will be successful--in Austen's time members of the Navy were awarded the spoils of the ships they took in Naval battles--and indeed he is.  But Lady Russell doesn't entirely believe in character alone as a predictor of success:  there must be some aristocratic or at least propertied family behind a young man to guarantee that he would get on in the world.  And of course Lady Russell's advice is wrong.

Indeed, if we shuffle through our memories of Austen's novels, we come up with a number of characters who believe they can use their powers of persuasion in this way.  Lady Catherine De Bourgh, with her tendency to look into Charlotte Collins's linen closets and advise on other ways of arranging them, is one such character.  Darcy's decision to persuade Bingley to give up Jane Bennet because she's not really attached to the latter is another example of this kind of persuasion gone wrong.  And of course, Emma could have been subtitled Persuasion, so disastrously flawed are Emma's efforts to arrange the lives of the people who live in her community.  Austen is suggesting, then, that when the powerful or the privileged think they know what is best for us, they risk, in Anne Elliot's words, giving "advice which is good or bad only as the event decides."  Those authoritarian persuaders often risk giving bad advice not only because humankind doesn't see the future particularly well, but also because it s difficult for any of us to comprehend another person's wishes, dreams, desires, or another's capabilities complete with secret strengths and weaknesses.

Yet persuasion is crucial to our social lives.  Those characters who are not "persuadable," like Anne's two sisters, Elizabeth Elliot and the hypochrondiacal Mary Musgrove,  and Anne's father, Sir Walter Elliot, are locked in their own world views.  These characters are treated satirically by Austen and shown to be individuals who are incapable of reality checks on either their finances, their social pretensions, or their beliefs about their own health.  We see these individuals locked inside their own perspectives and thus self-involved and unable to undertake their social obligations as members of the gentry.

This issue of being persuadable is most dramatically explored when Louisa Musgrove, who presents herself as someone of a determined mind not easily persuaded, decides against Wentworth's advice to take a second leap down the stairs at Lyme Regis onto the stony Cobb and falls, probably giving herself a concussion.  Anne Elliot wonders at the time if it occurred to Wentworth "to question the justness of his own previous opinion as to the universal felicity and advantage of firmness of character; and whether it might not strike him, that, like all other qualities of the mind, it should have its proportions and limits.  She thought t could scarcely escape him to feel that a persuadable temper might sometimes be as much in favour of happiness, as a very resolute character."

Like so many aspects of our social lives, persuasion works best as part of a conversation, not an edict.  When Anne attempts to persuade Captain Harville to moderate the grief he feels at the death of his betrothed, Fanny,  Anne talks to him about the literature they both love:  "He was evidently a young man of considerable taste in reading, though principally in poetry; and besides the persuasion of having given him at least an evening's indulgence in the discussion of subjects, which his usual companions had probably no concern in, she had the hope of being of real use to him in some suggestions as to the duty and benefit of struggling against affliction, which had naturally grown out of their conversation."  Such a conversation occurs again at the end of the novel in the life-changing moment when Anne realizes that her conversation with Harville's friend, Captain Benwick, about whether men or women have the most long-lasting feelings, is being heard by her former lover, Captain Wentworth, and she has a chance to speak to him indirectly about her feelings for him by suggesting that women continue to love long after it serves any purpose.  Benwick, of course, thinks that this is a quality of men:  as they have the hardiest bodies, so do they have the most long-lasting feelings.  Besides, he continues to argue, women's inconstancy is continually written about in "songs and proverbs." Anne argues that these songs and proverbs were written by men.  Benwick, frustrated, asks "How shall we prove any thing?"  Anne responds "We never shall.  We never can expect to prove any thing upon such a point.  It s a difference of opinion which does not admit of proof.  We each begin probably with a little bias towards our own sex, and upon that bias build every circumstance in favour of it which has occurred within our own circle."

Here Anne and Austen, far ahead of twenty-first century psychologists, observes the effects of "confirmation bias"  which my friend Katherine Arbuthnott has taught me about.  Because the world is complicated and at every turn we attempt to tame its chaos to make it manageable,  we tend to offer ourselves simplified narratives and explanations which feel comfortable to us because they accord with our beliefs.  As in Anne's explanation to Benwick, we choose to attend to or note only those cases which confirm our account.  This s probably not a significant problem in our daily lives; as Kahneman points out, most of the time we make "good enough" decisions based on our impressions.

But when we are making large-reaching and long-lasting decisions, "good enough" is not good enough.  Then we need to be aware of our confirmation bias and find ourselves a kind of devil's advocate who can see what we are inadvertently ignoring.  And here is where Jane Austen meets the academy and persuasion as a conversation meets academic freedom.

Canadian university administrators have recently reconsidered the issue of academic freedom, and have decided that the freedom of its teachers and researchers is limited to the scope of their scholarly expertise; we are not to question the administration's decisions unless we have the special knowledge that bears on the question at hand.  Not uncoincidentally, many of those university administrators now need to lead their institutions through a time of decreasing budgets.  This is precisely not the time to silence dissent, because one of those cranky and opinionated voices is going to see something the administrators themselves do not see in their quest for a coherent strategy.  As decisions are made about which programs to cut, which to support and develop, decisions about what the university of the future should look like in a society increasingly faced with more and more difficult decisions about scarce resources, social trends, new technologies, and the meanings of our lives, confirmation bias is going to become more, not less of a problem.  We simply can't afford at this critical moment to silence individuals who see beyond our coherent but simplified view of the future towards strategies that might be, in Austen's words, "good or bad only as the event decides."

We are seeing this trend in government, in the Saskatchewan government's refusal to consult widely about the community pastures, beyond those voices who will confirm the government's  already-made decision that "the market" is the most reliable means of determining what should happen to them.  We are also seeing this tendency in the Federal Government's decision to limit environmental protection at every turn.  If you are only looking at these issue through the lens that tells you that private ownership, growth in jobs, the development of natural resources--and thus the market--are the most important factors for deciding what to do with your land, you are not going to see what a species means to an ecosystem or understand what clean water contributes to peoples' lives.

I have worked in the academy for 36 years, and for much of that time have seen that one of its roles is to challenge the direction other parts of the culture is inadvertently--or advertently--taking.  Just as persuasion was central to the responsible conduct of Austen's characters, academic freedom is a central ballast for the wider culture, a way of questioning and perhaps moderating its values and goals through conversation.  Now is not the time to limit it.  In fact, it is self-defeating to do so.

Winter: when time is a prairie or a core sample of snow

If you live on the prairie, it's hard not to think of time in the terms the landscape dictates.  You unthinkingly see time and memory as something that stretches from horizon to horizon.  In the service of being more exact, you might fiddle with the metaphor a little.  At my age, you could envision the land tilting inexorably uphill, so that you see yourself closer to one horizon than  the other, rather than smack in the middle, the way you are on the flatter stretches of fields south of Regina.  That uphill tilt is indeed more exact, particularly on days at the end of term and before Christmas, when you have the same things to do you always had, the baking, shopping, wrapping, planning, shopping, cooking, with less energy to do it with.  Then there is the fervent wish to be doing exactly what you are doing--baking cookies for a neighbour who is undergoing chemotherapy--while also wanting to think in long draughts of thoughts about Virginia Woolf's ideal reader with only cats to interrupt.  The tension is painful.

That shorter horizon at the end of the rise before you is more dramatic when you long to sink into the field of ideas and words.  Because that closer horizon reminds you every day that there is less and less time between now and the point where your mind refuses to give you the right word, or to weave a complex formal pattern that you want all your writing to partake of in some way or another.  Less time between now and the age when you'll read mostly detective fiction because convention dictates that toward the end of the novel the detective will explain how he or she solved the crime and will recap all the details you have forgotten.

(Even to myself, I sound here like someone contemplating retirement.  But then there's an inward battle between the delights of teaching, the current financial and philosophical chaos at the U of R, the sense of isolation that will be part of my writing life when I retire, and the ecstasy of knowing that I can get up each morning to write.)

Then occasionally a gift arrives to throw your metaphor out the window.  Rather than standing in the middle of a prairie, you are driving down a prairie road and glimpse something surprising in your side view mirror, which always reminds you that "objects in mirror are closer than they appear."  (I thank Chris Brown for this metaphor, which he used in his linked collection of subtle, suggestive stories that made up his creative honours paper, "Coal Carriers," which I examined on Friday.  He was using the trope of the of the side view mirror for another purpose, not to describe memory, but he brought the possibilities of the metaphor to my attention.  Thanks Chris.)   December is generous with such gifts. I caught one grocery shopping on Saturday.  As I was heading from "milk" to "meat,"  I glanced down the row of tinned fish and saw flat, oblong cans of smoked oysters, something my father loved to eat during the holidays.  I think  I was the only one in the family who shared his taste for them.  Certainly,  I couldn't eat any today.  I'd find them too greasy, the oddly-coloured innards that are the consistency of damp plaster, plus the valve bits which are rubbery would be too weird for my taste now.

When I was talking to Chris about his linked set of short stories which begin, chronologically at least (though not formally) with a father's uncanny meeting with a bull moose that didn't seem to acknowledge his presence, I said that I found fathers (like cats) a mystery.  But it's more than that:  it's a mystery that's sidled right up to you in a hug or a whisper.  So I'm grateful for these moments when I catch my father in the side view mirror and he seems closer than he is.  Sometimes when my knees hurt, I remember rubbing my father's right knee from my perch in the middle of the Chevy's front seat.  I always think of him when we put up the Christmas tree.  He was so proud of choosing perfect trees that one year, when he brought home a real dud with gaps around the bottom, he sawed off lower branches, drilled holes in the trunk, and stuck the trimmed branches in the holes.  For the most part, I don't know the meaning of these moments.  Well, that's not true.  He'd been in the Navy, which perhaps left him with a sense of craftsmanship, of neatness, of pride in doing something in a workmanlike way.  That's what appears in the memory of the Christmas tree.  He had the skills and tools to make the tree look better; all he needed to add was the time.

But his character doesn't explain my eating smoked oysters with him or rubbing his knees while he drove.  As children, if we're loved, we seek intimacy with people we don't really understand.  We're too inexperienced and too busy being ourselves and seeing what that feels like to figure out other people.  We just know the intimacy feels good, even if it tastes funny.  And then suddenly it's too far from our present lives to get anything more than a glimpse of.

Let me madly mix metaphors.  Time may be a prairie with its shifting horizons; sometimes you may catch things made suddenly close by your side-view mirror.   But in December it's also a core sample, of mountain or snow.  That's because our whole surroundings are saturated with memory's prompts.  When I looked down that aisle at the smoked oysters, there was a Christmas carol on the muzak and there was holiday food everywhere.  Our memories are on overdrive.  This seems natural to me somehow.  As the days grow shorter and shorter, as I sit daydreaming in front of the Christmas tree in the dark, it seems a good thing to pull up a core sample of snow and study the layers that are brought close by the time and in inclination to reflect.  Maybe above all, in the seasonal busy-ness of shopping and wrapping and cooking, time to reflect is really what I'm longing for.

Beneath a Petroliferous Moon

In 1940, Pablo Neruda published his poem, "Standard Oil Co," which concludes

They buy countries, people, seas, police, county councils,
distant regions where the poor hoard their corn
like misers their gold:
Standard Oil awakens them,
clothes them in uniforms, designates
which brother is the enemy.
the Paraguayan fights its war,
and the Bolivian wastes away
in the jungle with its machine gun.

A President assassinated for a drop of petroleum,
a million-acre mortgage,
a swift execution on a morning mortal with light, petrified,
a new prison camp for subversives,
in Patagonia, a betrayal, scattered shots
beneath a petroliferous moon,
a subtle change of ministers
in the capital, a whisper
like an oil tide,
and zap, you’ll see
how Standard Oil’s letters shine above the clouds,
above the seas, in your home,
illuminating their dominions.

How Pablo Neruda knew this about oil and its place in our lives in 1940 eludes me, except that I suspect it has something to do with my profound and embarrassing lack of knowledge about how oil companies exploited South American governments who either could not or would not hold them to ethical standards.

Neruda's description of a world "Beneath a petroliferous moon" is the title of an exhibition at the Mendel curated by Jen Budney.  She has gathered together artists from as far afield as Benin, Rome, Austria, and Canada in an aesthetic query of lives that are made possible by the energy that comes from oil.

Immediately inside the gallery the viewer is faced with Louisa Conrad's "Disintegration:  A Catalogue of Arctic Flowers 2009."  Scraps of drawing paper have been carelessly cut and adhered to the wall in a kind of constellation; each of these contains a beautiful, detailed pen and ink drawing of the flora Conrad saw on her trip to the Canadian Arctic in 2009.  The form these take on the wall figures forth the disintegration of our arctic, the thawing of the permafrost and the melting of the polar ice cap brought on by climate change.  

Next, one is faced with Ernst Logar's "Documents and Drawings."  These contain a sequence of large photographs (perhaps 24" by 30"), each presenting a serene and seemingly unspoiled landscape--a field or a sea shore.  Except that in the foreground of each of these there are awkwardly built tripods with assemblages nailed to them--plastic bottles, tools, oil cans.  I didn't quite know how to read the tripods:  were they an artist's ironic easel?  Or the tripod for a weapon or a camera?  Or a surveyor's levelling instrument--so crucial for marking off the ownership of land?  Whatever they were, they obscured much of the beauty beyond them.  

Yoruba artist Romuald Hazoume of Benin has created masks out of containers for motor oil and other oil products.  While these clearly reference the African masks appreciated and collected by Virginia Woolf's friend, Roger Fry or written about by D.H. Lawrence in Women in Love, or even the more edgy faces represented by Picasso, they also marked a shift in the tradition.  While those masks were crafted into their formalized shapes, these were violently cut and smashed.  Oil has done something to the human face, they seem to suggest.

Most easily read and yet most dramatic were Edward Burtynsky's photographs of the oil sands.  Taken from the height of an "establishing  shot," they first give the viewer a sense of the immensity of the landscape.  Then one sees that the earth's skin has literally been peeled away or has been pocked with machinery, roads, and vehicles necessary for getting at the oil beneath.

Many of these artists spoke of the way in which the energy from oil that makes our lives possible seems almost invisible--present in our communities only in the little corner gas stations where we grab a coke or a newspaper or even a bundle of firewood.  They sought through their work to make oil more visible, something Robert Ladislas Derr did quite literally by videotaping a street in Oil City Pennsylvania, America's first oil town, through the film of oil gliding down the window the viewer looks out of.  It is beautiful and horrifying at the same time.  

In a little gallery next door to these works I found Terry Billings's elegiac "Reassembled Moult," a carpet of Sandhill Crane feathers that flows lyrically down the gallery wall and onto the floor.  Nearby was Billings's "Revealed Wasp Drawings," made (how I am not entirely sure) from the paper of wasps' nests.  These were the thoughtful monochrome of Art McKay's mandalas, while the movement of the subtle designs recalled the spinning of the stars in Van Gogh's "Starry Night."  Something has happened to art, this juxtaposition seemed to say.  Cranes and wasps can unconsciously be and make beauty (albeit mediated by an artist), while the human presence is deforming the planet.  Yet oddly enough, this was a hopeful exhibition:  around the world, artists are giving us portraits of ourselves, landscapes of the world we have made.  None of these works was what my friend Diane Whitehouse used to derisively call "a one-read painting."  They all asked for our imaginative attention, our engagement, which is the first step toward reflection and perhaps change.

You can find the rest of Neruda's poem here:
http://revolutionaryfrontlines.wordpress.com/2010/06/26/standard-oil-co-by-pablo-neruda-canto-general/

You can find the Mendel's website for this exhbition here:
http://www.mendel.ca/2012/beneath-a-petroliferous-moon#more-6239

Time and the Land

I had one of my first Saskatchewan existential and historical  shocks galloping on a horse above Echo Lake on high grass prairie, the smell of sage stirred up by the horses all around me.  I had spent the afternoon riding through some of the most beautiful landscape I knew in the Qu'Appelle Valley, which I'd really only seen by car.  On a horse, you wind along the coulees filled with golden birch, you are part of the mysterious folding and winding of the land.

I was with my colleagues in the English Department on a Sunday horseback riding afternoon organized by Jeanne Shami at Clayton Cyr's ranch on reserve land.  As I looked at the landscape and at my colleagues--Jeanne Shami, Ken Mitchell, Barb Powell and her husband Dave, Nick Ruddick and his wife Britt Holmstrom, as well as our children, I tried to understand what complex threads had taken me from richly treed Ann Arbor Michigan to the Qu'Appelle valley.  The thread was obviously my education, which was why I tied one end of it to Ann Arbor and the other to the colleagues around me.  It was one of those moments when beauty shocks you into being profoundly where you are; at the same time the moment's intensity poses questions.  Why are you here, listening to the wind off the prairie and the breathing of horses, the flickering of birch leaves in your ears, the smell of sage in your nose, your eyes drinking a landscape whose beauty and mystery you could never have imagined?  Why are you here at all?  What mysteries of physics and biology have led to the creation of this world and your improbable existence in it?

I had a quieter echo of that shock last Friday when I found myself in room full of ranchers and farmers, environmentalists and poets and artists, civil servants and psychology professors, considering what it means for the province to sell off the fragile pastures that have been protected since the 1930s when farming practices that didn't take the quality of the soil or the possibility of drought into account led to huge clouds of prairie top soil falling into the Atlantic Ocean.

The night before, we had heard Candace Savage's description of this landscape's beauty and vulnerability.  Bad public policy decisions that led to breaking the soil in the Palliser Triangle, an area of mixed grassland in the arid southern portion of the province that some believe to be an extension of U.S. deserts, had led to extreme erosion and loss of native species of plants and animals. One of her many slides included a photograph from Canada's Atlantic coast of an immense black cloud over the ocean:  prairie topsoil.  Candace whimsically and incisively tied her talk both to her ancestors and to her descendants as a way of reminding us that we are but temporary stewards of this land and that we should seek to preserve it, not only for our grandchildren, but for the generations of native plant and animal species that come after us.

She also talked of how the PFRA land management was returning this land to its original austere beauty.  The Prairie Farm Reclamation Administration paid to put stewards on the land, pasture managers who, over the last seventy years have observed and questioned, developing the lore and the practices that allow this land to thrive.  Land that was originally grazed by buffalo still needs to be grazed--but not over-grazed.  Hence one of the jobs of the pasture managers is to organize cattle grazing.  Pasture patrons pay for the management of their herds, paying a large part of the costs for the management of the land; that land in turn supports the overall Saskatchewan rural economy. Pasture managers live in rural communities and their presence there is one of the things that keeps these communities alive.

The federal government no longer wants to manage these lands, so they have devolved to the province.  In turn, the province wants to privatize this rich and fragile ecosystem as quickly as possible, proving once again that they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.  (Thank you, Oscar Wilde.)  So spearheaded by naturalist Trevor Herriot, Katherine Arbuthnott, (a U of R psychologist who's passionate about the environment and is continually exploring how knowledge of psychology can help us see what nature contributes to our daily lives and how we can convince people to take better care of it), Emily Eaton (from the U of R geography department), and Naomi Beingessner (from RPIRG), a "Pastures Forum" was organized that included farmers, ranchers, the aboriginal community, the union representative of the pasture managers, and anyone else who cared.   So here was my second existential and historical shock:  what was I doing sitting behind a very tall man in a large black cowboy hat with a notebook tucked into the back of his jeans listening to the history of the PFRA?

We began the day with Doug Faller, the policy manager of the Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan, quoting philosopher George Santayana:  "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."  Initially, the Palliser Triangle was seen as too arid to farm, but when botanist George Macoun visited the area in the 1870s, there had been an unusual amount of rain, leading him to observe that it would be fine for agriculture.  There followed three dry periods during which farming and grazing on that land collapsed:  1906-7, 1918-20, and the dirty thirties.  May of 1934 saw the largest ecological disaster in the history of Canada, when dust clouds traveled all the way to the Atlantic.  From the size of the clouds, they calculated that the sky contained 300,000,000 acres before they gave up calculating. 

What began in the 1870s with a bad public policy decision was brought to an end in 1935 when the PFRA was created "to manage a productive, biodiverse rangeland and to promote environmentally responsible land use and practices."  Their first objective was to preserve environmentally sensitive land, though they soon recognized that cattle grazing played an important role in creating a healthy ecosystem. In the 77 years since its creation, pasture managers have observed and experimented with the land under their protection, evolving some of the best techniques for the management of the environment.  In turn, their work helped sustain mixed farms and the rural communities that support them.  According to Faller, the PFRA folks have a business plan:  the cost of managing the land is a mere 25% of the benefits to farmers, ranchers, and the Saskatchewan economy.  He pointed out that this was a remarkably good investment.

Not surprisingly, Trevor Herriot spoke of the 31 species at risk that live protected on the community pastures.  His list makes a kind of poem, so I'll simply paste it in.  There are three mammals in trouble, the swift fox, the black-footed ferret, and the black tailed prairie dog.  There are six plants at risk: smooth goosefoot,  western spiderwort, hairy prairie clover, buffalo grass, slender mouse-ear cress, and western spiderwort.  There are three reptiles: northern leopard frog, great paint frog, and the eastern yellow-bellied racer.  There are three lepidoptera:  the monarch dusky dune moth, the gold-edged gem moth, and the mormon metalmark butterfly.  Then there are the birds, which are closest, I think, to Trevor's heart:  the piping plover,the common nighthhawk, the long-billed curlew, the mountain plover, sprague's pippet, the  bobolink, the barn swallow, the chestnut-collared long spur, the barred sparrow, the loggerhead shrike, the peregrin falcon, the ferrugenous hawk, the sage grouse, (in real trouble), the short-eared owl, and the burrowing owl.  He described this land, with its rich and fragile ecosystem, as "our old growth forest.  They are a lily pad in a sea of disturbance," he told us.  The PFRA pasture managers have led the way in species at risk care in North America.  They've developed a model that other agencies have adopted.  It was developed in the field, with the pasture managers.  Cowboys and environmentalists.  But the Species at Risk Act is is a federal law and can only be applied to federally-owned land.  Once the land is sold, it ceases.

The provincial government has told managers and patrons that it has 5.7 million dollars to help them.  Help them do what?  As Chief Roland Crowe tactfully put it, the provincial government has been rather vague about what managers and patrons might do with these funds.  He was only the last in a long line of voices who begged the provincial government to slow down on this decision and consider all the sides.  Katherine Arbuthnott pointed out to me this morning that even businesses are incorporating a "devil's advocate" into their decision-making process when there isn't someone to play this role because they've learned that when you have a number of like-minded people, a homogeneous group, making decisions, you leap to conclusions and miss nuances.  

Voices.  Wise, complementary, nuanced voices.  That was really what the poet in me was at the Pastures Forum to hear.  You'll quit reading if I go on summarizing the things everyone said, but I need to tell you about the voices.  Chief Roland Crowe's velvety, patient voice, respecting the nature of time.  Joanne Brochu's matter-of-fact, well-informed voice.  Brent Cramer in his black cowboy hat and slow drawl observing that he didn't think "the university can tell me how to take care of my grass;  we've done it for three generations and I hope my kids will do it after I'm dead.”  Yes, he used the word dead.  No euphemisms here.  "A cattleman is one of the best managers.  He's got to be.  Ranchers are not in it for the money."  Inter-generational passing of the land is their raison d'etre, along with a good healthy life style and an ability to pay the bills.

Time was on everyone's mind.  The long time that the earth was here before we were, creating a rich ecosystem just for the hell of it, for the beauty of it.  The time it takes to wrap your head and your soul around the enormity of a prairie landscape.  The number of times--three, now--that prairie people have suffered because we've been bad stewards.  The provincial government's hurry, which can only be motivated by the desire to get this over and done with before people realize how stupid it is.  And the time until the next drought.  Because it isn't "if" there's a drought.  It's "when."

Minimalism

In Monday's Globe and Mail, as part of "the weekly challenge" feature, Courtney Shea wrote about a week's experiment meant to challenge her relationship with clothing.  She wore the same clothes for an entire week. Shea wisely chose a comfortable jersey dress that could be dressed up or down with accessories and that could be quickly washed.  Except for one colleague who asked "What's with the dress?" no one seemed to notice or to comment.  For Shea, this experiment had ethical overtones:  According to To Die For:  Is Fashion Wearing Out the World? most North American and many European women buy half their body weight in clothes every year and own four times as many outfits as they did thirty years ago.

I've flirted with minimalism over the years.  My first husband and I started our home in the early seventies, an age of slender glass canisters and sleek white china.  Perhaps most radical was our crystal, which, unlike any we received when we were married, lacked the curving almost human profile that has been traditional for centuries.  Ours was completely straight, and had a thick bottom rather than a slender stem, a single drop of air trapped in the base.  When we separated thirteen years later, I began an anti-minimalist rebellion, buying myself Christmas presents (to unwrap alone while my daughter spent the day with him): antique pillowcases with hand-knit lace, and china teacups, many of them, I now confess, appalled at my choices, pink.  These are slowly making their way into the annual Cathedral Village Arts Festival garage sales.  I can only give up so much of my past at a time.

Since our renovations, Bill and I have put things back into the rooms we emptied with more thought for what we value.  There's more art on the living room walls, but fewer quilts in the upstairs hallway:  I don't want to muddle the walls' serene pale blue.  Moving back into the kitchen, I put tools I seldom used into a box, with the promise that only if I used them six months after the reno was finished would I let them back into my drawers--which are now much clearer, though not up to IKEA standards.  My food processor and my blender are in cupboards, so I have a much clearer and more pleasant space to work in.  I had no idea how infrequently I used them.

The delight I feel with an emptier closet or clearer drawers or a blank walls that have only slices of sunlight or shadows of tree branches for their decor has drawn my attention to the fact that many of my happiest hours, weeks, or even months have been spent in spaces that looked very like Thoreau's cabin on Walden Pond.  My first experience was my dormitory room at the University of Michigan, a small room with lead-paned windows that cranked outwards and that I kept open for most of the winter because the dorm was hot.  I also stored my bottle of port, bought to help me sleep, on the stone window ledge, six storeys up. A bookcase, a comfortable chair, a bed, and a desk:  what more do you need to explore the world of ideas other than simple furniture, a library card and challenging classes?  An electric typewriter and some paper, perhaps.

My two weeks at the Emma Lake Kenderdine Campus, which the University of Saskatchewan has decided to close, may have appeared to an outsider to be a "retreat," but how can you explain the remarkable  inner voyages you can take when the encouraging layers of history and creativity all around you seem to speak every time you mind stills for an instant or trips over itself, momentarily lost?  In the workroom of my cabin, with its eight windows looking onto the lake and the boreal forest, I had a small yellow table splattered with paint and ink, traces of past inhabitants, probably artists or scientists--who really are fellow travellers, both of them attuned to wonder. I knew that Clement Greenberg and Barnet Newman had spent time there, that it had been a place for the Regina Five to gather, that Dorothy Knowles and William Perehudoff had found peace and inspiration there.  One of Greenberg's main tenets was that a painter's canvas was simply a flat space:  how vigorously Perehudoff and McKay challenged and realized that idea.  At the same time, can you think of two painters more radically different than Barnet Newman and Dorothy Knowles?  Here is one of the paradoxes of minimalism: that these simple cabins can give rise to such exuberant variety.

The monastic rooms at St. Michael's Abbey, where I spent a wonderful Sage Hill Writing Experience, similarly have a calm, supportive aura. The cabins in the Leighton Colony at the Banff Centre for the arts also resonate:  they have guest books for everyone to sign so that there is a kind of narrative linking the creative lives of the people who thrive there, whose work thrives there.  Yet this is a space devoid of your personality:  all I brought was a computer and a guitar.  I think it's that absence of self that's liberating in some almost Buddhist way.

I'm quite sure that minimalism can give rise to creativity, whether it's Thoreau's simple cabin on Walden Pond or Turner's eyrie at Petworth, which I've always envied.  Though realistically one needs to realize that the rigours of simplicity don't suit everyone.  Consider the studios of Picasso or Cezanne, full of props and ideas.

But I can't quite work out the relationship between the aesthetics and the ethics of simplicity.  In some ways, those who have chosen very simple lives, people like Thoreau or the monks at St. Michael's Abbey, conceived of an ethical component to simplicity that is almost Buddhist:  mindfulness, the freedom to reflect, observe, and imagine, they might say, is gained by a certain detachment from things, even while the simplicity created by that detachment is frequently beautiful.  There's also the practical fact:  if you're not interested in amassing things, you can work less and create or reflect more.  But David Claerbaut's video, "Sunrise,"which I wrote about last February, makes it quite clear that minimalism requires a lot of upkeep and can be both beautiful and alienating.  Frequently the most elegantly simple clothing is also the most expensive.  (Though jewelery these days is opting for the baroque and extravagant, almost as if it's flying in the face of the economic downturn..)

 "Less is more" pronounced Mies van Der Rohe, as he stripped down the high rise.  "A house is a machine for living," observed Le Corbusier as he built homes like the Villa Savoy.  My daughter, Veronica, who has studied "Corb," tells me that aesthetically appealing and simple spaces were both quite expensive and not very home-like.  He had hoped to help us strip down our own lives to what was important by providing a visual corollary for us to contemplate.  At the same time, however, there's no place to comfortably sit and contemplate in his houses; he's always moving you on to the next task in its perfectly-defined and designed space. He has not designed the modernist version of Thoreau's cabin at Walden.

I confess I love winter.  (Don't tell Bill.)  I love its minimalism.  I spend autumn engrossed in searching out the truth of the subtle greyed colours and the complex textures of trees, shrubs, grasses that have dried or lost their leaves.  Some days it is a stretch to see the beauty that I somehow cannot live without, cannot stop searching for.  Then one morning I wake to a new-made world.  There is a white harmony in the naked textures and more space to breath in the chilly air.

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.