Late in the afternoon, Alright, I’ve given Paglia a fair shake, but alas, no. The energy required to sift through her self-aggrandizing provocations to find nuggets of meaningful insight is more than I have to spend, especially when other books beckon. Let it be known that I approached her latest with goodwill and open curiosity, and made it through a full third of the essays and interviews printed therin. I like the paper the publisher chose. It felt like crisp linen sheets on my fingers as I turned each page. A first for me; the quality of paper upstaged what was printed on it. I could not overcome a growing distress over the state of the world as seen through Paglia’s judgemental lens. For me, she misses an interesting examination of the rich complexities of what it is to be human by directing our gaze again and again back to herself, as a kind of Queen of Opinion. I suppose that’s the game of (mostly white) pundits and politicos, as paid by the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, FT, etc… to divide and distract us. Not playin; I closed her book. Popova now, in Figuring (2019) introduces me to complex, interconnected humans I’d never hoped to learn about and from in this way – Johannes Kepler, Maria Mitchell, Caroline Herschel, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Sophia Peabody in the first five dancing chapters alone. I will happily carry her bright yellow book with me until it’s done and my mind is fully changed by it. Likewise with Shotwell’s Against Purity (2016), Tsing et al (Ed)’s Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017), Berger on Landscapes, another on synesthesia, another on natural soundscapes. Like a spring filly released into the field, I am without academic harness for the first time in 2.5 years. I can read whatever I want to. With gown and hood, I graduate from my masters program, then drive around Southern Ontario (as we do) for 17 hours, to deliver, pick up, visit, revisit. Before that a week of family and friends, to celebrate the beautiful complexities of my Dad and the resonances he leaves with his passing – another kind of travel, through time and story. Before that, 20 days of a journey in and through Dublin, Lyon, Tuscany, Florence, Edinburgh and all the related airports, train stations and car rentals, going backwards through the history of my ancestors, taking note of the ideas and economics and systems that formed their world, centuries ago, in four cultures and three languages. May feels like a long run-on sentence I have yet to punctuate properly. It sits in a pile of boarding passes, maps, brochures, museum tickets and restaurant receipts on my dining room table. But I am Home, where the plants and the windows, the kettle and the bullet-strong coffee, not latté, cafè latté, espresso or cappuccino, much as I love all of those. The park and my patient, glowing studio, the now-opened books, my excellent bed and windows in all directions. My cello out of his case and ready for ritual every morning, the starlings singing through the bathroom window. Home which feels different because I am different after these journeys that still need punctuation, these travels I still need to claim sense from. All in good time. The horizons have been pushed far far beyond what I imagined; the world is impossibly, curiously new. There is plenty of good work to be done here which I’m happy and eager to begin. …after I read just a little more.
Grand Plan In the corner of my well-collected room there is a gilded chair, with cushions of soft cedar green. I observe both chair and my pleasure in it, thinking how odd it is to have something right there in my room so finely made that the gilding is not ostentatious, but appropriate. I do not sit in it. My room, looking away from the gilded chair, at the bay window couch where I’ve been reading anthropological studies of the Western Conservatory Music culture all day Art Fundamentals 7th edition (Ocvirk/Stinson/Wigg/Bone/Cayton, 1994); Free to be Musical (Higgins/Campbell, 2010); The Tone of our Times (Dyson, 2014) – this week’s doors, waiting to be unlocked, to be passed through. Other doors I’ve left open behind me, each granting passage into a thought-provoking room, hallway, staircase. view from reading couch Up, down, through, in. Cognitive dungeon to library to kitchen to widow’s peak – each a different ‘ology’, each a story that links to all the others ever written, and those only now being conceived. My mind is becoming vast like an ever-expanding castle, which, although timely and immensely satisfying, is not entirely comfortable. Often it’s a tight squeeze. I forget things like where the car is, what music I need to find, what day it is…. Union Station subway poem, rush hour Oct 27 Travel and roads. I’ve spent a great deal of time not-home, in-between. I don’t mind this 600+ km each week of highway through orange maple trees and purple skies, cropped fields and pumpkins on shelves by the roadside. Pumpkins like people, each one a different shape and size, some sideways, some flat, some enormous, others tiny, a couple of them smashed into pulp on the road. In between I read through and into cognitive change. I tune my cello/voice and play/sing for Tom Thomson, for Mary Sue Rankin, who are gone from here but also Not-Gone, ever. I am honoured and humbled to be part of a circle teaching gift from three powerful indigenous women, and to be gifted an improvised-traditional calligraphic rendering of my friend and colleague’s Chinese name. As the kilometres go by and events sift down into understanding, I realize with growing certainty that the most valuable ones are those that cannot be purchased. Home from Toronto Oct 29. Oh yes. Lawyers (an interesting and useful contrast), to collaboratively and fairly settle and resolve a marriage that ended three years ago. Muffler replacement on my hard-working honda. These are purchased in the name of maintenance, a ‘taking care of’. A garden full of beautiful perennials (rescued from the bad marriage), now being choked by goutweed – I will start digging it out tomorrow morning, also putting away the beautiful summer writing space on my back deck, now blanketed by yellow ash leaves. Certainly, for things like these, for ‘taking care of’, it’s good to earn a decent living. My beautiful ash tree, three weeks ago, just after Thanksgiving. Now it’s mostly on the deck. Remembrance day concert soon in the marvellously thriving community arts centre – this one a collaboration of elementary school musicians and the community concert choir, who both need cello, lucky me. Things you can’t purchase, but have the greatest value. Generosity. Thanks-giving. Remembrance. Care.
January 2013 A fog-laden wind sifts through tree boughs to the northwest. Into my left ear the presto drip of snowmelt on metal roof is punctuated by a random slide, thunk of heavier stuff pulled to ground. On my lap, the steady, thundering purr of kitten. The dark outside is thick with visible air, like stirred winter stew. It feels almost balmy after these minus 29 degree days so I’m tempted to stay out… but no. To inside, under thick blankets. To listen, not look. And here, like a gift, like a soul’s massage, is the heavy rain. It’s been travel travel for me these past weeks, through the bustling silence of January 2013. Not what I had expected. The first month of the year in this place has always had the sensibility of a well-caught breath. For me it’s always held the promise of a month of stacked, not linear time – so that ‘was’, ‘is’ and ‘will be’ are all in the same moment. This makes it oh so much easier to find and feel the “Ah. Yes” – the insight that will become the engine for the following months and years. Oddly enough – even amid the schedule and the travel and the deadlines, the all-nighters, the practise and the rehearsals, the cover letters and the interviews, the Wagner, the B&B and the Beethoven, this has still happened. There is clarity even in this fog of winter stew, and I feel quite deeply certain about a few key things. KG, I need an axe song – can we talk? L, I need a couple of songs from you too. Owen Sound – we need to make good music education available to every kid in this place – and soon. I’m not kidding about this – in another well-identified post I will gather links and information to illustrate beyond any doubt what is possible here. To the women of #IdleNoMore – I get it. Thank you for opening a place where we can all talk and heal together. G, I get where we’re going, and it’s good. T, thanks & good luck with the simplification project. F, L – courage. Darlin D – well done. Oh I feel blessed.