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SubTerrain » sandbox

One on One

The last time I saw Trisha we were supposed to get together for some noose-play. The format was usually the same. I’d go over to her place. She’d drag out her slutty leather dress, black stilettos and rubber top. We’d smoke a joint then have a glass of wine and pretty soon the porn would roll out: Gallows Girls, Date with the Hangman or else some strangulation clips she’d pieced together from various horror movies and put onto a CD.

Once she got high she’d moan and that was my cue. I’d strip down naked and get on my knees. Trish would tie me up and walk around the room with her heels clicking on the hardwood floor. Then she’d examine my physique like it was a laboratory specimen, pull out the rope from her cedar chest and prepare the noose with painful precision. She was into detail. Either I’d end up by choking out right away or else she’d toss the other end of the rope over a ceiling beam. Either-or, it was lights and sirens all the way.

I’d been into asphyxia as long as I can remember, probably way back into childhood. My first memory of sexual excitement was watching the hanging scene in Cat Ballou when Jane Fonda gets noosed and then rubbing my crotch on the shag carpet of our living room floor.

Transsexuals were something I was never really into. Not that I knew of, anyway. Sure, I’d seen them in porn magazines but in small town Alberta we didn’t have many working in grocery stores. Finding women who were into kinky stuff was a pretty tall order and I was tired of dating columns, web sites and tennis games that ended in agricultural discussions. Beggars couldn’t be choosers. Pro dommes were okay, but you had to drive all the way into Calgary for that. They charged a lot of money and came with their own set of troubles.

On the last Sunday of every month the Black Rhino Pub and Western Grill had a costume night and most of the kinky folk in the Red Deer valley went there under the guise of “dressing up.” No one else drank on a Sunday night in our town so management posted a cover charge and let us do what we wanted. The owners begrudgingly enforced a dress code that kept the soldiers from Suffield at bay.

The first time I saw Trish I thought she was a girl. She leaned over the bar with a champagne cocktail and had on a black mini skirt, white blouse and blue wig. She was beautiful really, too much makeup, but stunning. Lithe, thick-lipped, something you’d expect to see on that old British television series UFO where all the spacewomen had big boobs, blue hair and Lycra spacesuits.

“That’s nice hair,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said back.

Up close you could tell: Adam’s apple, strong hands and a voice pitched halfway in the wrong direction, but by then I was already in far too deep to back out.

Talking kink to strangers was fair game at the Rhino. Essentially that’s why people went even though most of them were wannabes. Small talk was just a waste of time.

“What are you into?” I asked her.

“Role play,” she said. “Breath control, asphyxia. I like scenes with a beginning, middle and end. You know, narrative.”

Then she giggled and bit on her string of white pearls. If there had been a lightning rod outside, I would have been fried. This was the grand prize, the Lotto Max. Well, maybe the Lotto Mini Max because the pure gold would have been a woman, but what the hell this was good. What she had between her legs simply didn’t matter.

“Fabulous,” I said. “Do you like noose-play?”

“Oh yes. I used to watch westerns when I was a teenager. My mother thought I was into horses.”

“I think we’ll get on.”

Trish sized me up, considered her options then glanced around at the competition. The bar was filled with a number of overweight oil riggers, some obviously disturbed kinksters with prosthetic limbs and a few newbies who looked very nervous. The men outnumbered the women, the women called the shots and most people’s idea of kink in the Red Deer valley was doing missionary in the barn.

“You don’t mind?” she said. She held up her cocktail and stared at the olive so the sentence didn’t need to be finished.

“You’re gorgeous.”

Her eyelashes fluttered. Her gold fingernail circled the rim of her glass.

“You’ve done a T-Girl before?”

“Sure,” I lied. “Had playmates in Calgary. Pretty low-key there. You don’t see many cross-dressers at the stampede.”

She laughed. I got a drink. The bartender stood on the other side of his fence expressionless. He had been given strict instructions by the management to stay non-judgmental, shut up and collect the tabs.

“Have you played with anyone here?” she said.

Okay, I’d gotten to know a few friends here. Sal, the blonde who was drinking scotch at the One Armed Bandit, I dated but that didn’t work out. Sal liked ponies way too much. Jen, a tall brunette in her fifties, stood by the jukebox in her rubber suit. Architect by trade, she was into flogging, which I liked, but she was looking for a husband and I wasn’t. Tom and Terry were gay. Not that that bothered me. They liked to talk about rodeos and came to the club together because this was the only place in town they could act natural. Pam, a woman my age with red hair, walked past us and lifted her glass. She was athletic, into just about anything, but she was also the most sought after commodity in the circuit, knew it, and so I didn’t bother. I’d been down that road before.

“Nothing serious,” I said. “Pam’s okay to look at but that’s it.”

“Trouble.”

“Really?”

“I mean I’ve got nothing against her personally, but there’s a lot of estrogen flying around in that chassis.”

“Bi?”

“Mmm,” Trish said. “Drama queen. The lengths she’ll go to are unbelievable.”

“Whatever.”

The evening wore on and somewhere around Tom Collins number four it dawned on me that Trisha’s real name was Tad and he worked in the Chamber of Commerce. Great looking guy but I’d only ever seen him from a distance and, besides, at the club you didn’t talk about what went on in vanilla life. Rule 1(a): No blabbing. I checked my watch.

“What do you think?” I said.

She bit her pearls again and stared at the ceiling.

“Do you want to go to my place?”

I waited the compulsory one-point-five seconds.

“All right,” I said.

“Me topping you. Me on top all the way since it’s our first time.”

“Sure.”

This was an absolutely ludicrous thing to consent to. Going to a complete stranger’s house by yourself and being on the receiving end of some very dangerous technical work was not a street-smart decision. There are probably stats on how many people die each year with ropes around their necks, but I didn’t care. I convinced myself that her deference rendered her harmless. Saying I was so big and strong that I had to be on the bottom. And then it just didn’t matter. I took her hand and we walked to the front door. Her shoulder smelled of lime. All the would-be perverts in the bar eyed us with needy condescension and Trish gave someone in the corner a screw-you wave.

Trish’s house was a wartime bungalow on the industrial side of the tracks. Lots of creosote, railway ties and abandoned grain silos. The stucco was grey and the sidewalk patiently cracked. Out front there was a bed of weeds and a lonely thistle garden. She drove her truck around back and parked down the alley that was encased in caragana.

“Neighbours,” she said. “There’s just no point in parking out front.”

The inside of the house was sparse and lonely. A couch, a cold hardwood floor and a couple of black books on the shelf detailing public planning policy. We went straight downstairs. Downstairs was where the action happened. Downstairs was it. Teak floor, big screen TV, air ionizer, full spectrum lighting and a couple of telltale hooks hanging from the beams that couldn’t be used for potted plants. The door to the playroom had a window in it and also a lock.

“I cook upstairs,” she said. “This is where I live.”

She turned on the lights, closed the curtain and leaned back on her IKEA sofa.

“Joint?” she said.

“Why not?”

Trish lit up. Hard to tell if her tits were implants or falsies. Didn’t matter. The cold hardness of desire swept over her face and she stretched her long legs on a pillow. Her makeup made her look Oriental.

“Strip for me,” she said.

Part of the kinkster game is you can do all kinds of over-the-top stuff and get away with it. Stuff that would get you thrown out of a grade eight drama class is prime time here. I stripped down and stood straight out, pounding, aching, stretching and making all the air in the basement reek of testosterone. Then I got down on my knees and kissed her shoes. The skin on her calf was tanned and amazingly smooth. Somewhere in the last thirty seconds she had lost her nylons. She got up, walked around behind me and tied my hands behind my back with a hair dryer cord. Then she pulled a thick cotton rope out from a cedar chest and bit on the end. I got all the technical details of the rope’s weight, diameter, hemp content and load limit. I’ll never forget her made up face absolutely perfect in want, the black pupils searching deep and insect-like into a need of mine no one else had ever seen. She fastened one end of the rope around the beam in a half hitch and the other around my neck. Then she pulled up her dress. Champagne bubbles burst in my head, my throat filled with salt and an alarm clock went off as my skull hit the floor.

“How was that?” she said after. She lounged on the sofa with another cocktail and her toenails had pink lilies painted on them.

“Fabulous.”

“I think I’ll keep you.”

The next day, I saw Pam in the bank. I knew she was going to break a cardinal rule of the club but she strolled up to the cheque-writing counter and stood way too close to be anything but sexual.

“How did it go last night?” she said.

I gave her a blank stare. She had a yellow rodeo scarf wrapped around her neck like a lot of tourists did in the middle of the summer and cowboy boots that probably hadn’t been out of their box in years.

“Fine.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to talk to you last night,” she said. “Didn’t want to interrupt. Got time for lunch?”

“I guess.”

“Why have you been ignoring me?”

This seemed to be pretty much a law of the kink universe. You’d spend years looking for people in solitude, going to stupid socials, attending workshops, answering ads, and nothing, nada, nyet, then all of a sudden you got lucky and everybody wanted a chip of the action. We went over to the Big Horn for a Bronto Burger and got a booth. Pam smelled of lilac perfume, something French anyway. She had delicate features, a small nose, and in the daylight her hair was the same colour as a barn on fire. She held her fingers up in an okay sign as she ate so she wouldn’t get mayo on the table and quizzed me about my nocturnal encounter.

“I didn’t take you for the bi type,” she said.

“I’m not.”

She gave me a queer look and asked for another Pepsi.

“Please,” she said.

“Trish and I just had a lot in common.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She’s a nice lady.”

Pam raised an eyebrow and agreed on the pronoun according to protocol.

“I guess I just know the other side of her,” she said.

“Which side?”

“The Tad side.”

I shrugged. Like I fucking cared.

“You’ve done the plastic bag routine with her?” she asked.
I dished out the “gentlemen don’t tell” smile.

Pam wasn’t giving up. She wanted content. Some of the mayo stuck to her chin and she made a point of shoving her index finger down her throat to clean it up.

“She likes the One Hour Martinizing bags because they cling,” she said.

“Really.”

“But she plays rough. Don’t get me wrong. I like rough.”

The words lingered for a dramatically long time. “In fact, I like almost everything. Watching, too. But look after yourself. Have a good fail-safe system in place is all I can say.”

She took a menthol cigarette out of her purse, tapped the end of the tabletop, but didn’t light up. A sign above the door said No Smoking. $200.00 fine.

“Are you a pro?” I said.

“A what?”

“A Pro domme.” Calling someone a whore was rude but a Pro domme had a ring of aristocracy. “I mean not at this minute, but at some time in the past? You just have that air about you.”

What I was actually saying in code was you are being a bitch, but Pam didn’t take the bait.

“Can you play tennis?” she said.

“Yes. Of course I can play tennis.”

“No, I mean can you really play? Are you any good? Not can you put on a pair of white shorts and look smart. It’s tough finding good players around here. All the guys want to do is cattle rope and they get their dicks stuck in the net.”

“I’m good,” I said.

“Up for a game some time?” She studied her unlit cigarette. Her red nails were perfectly manicured. “Just tennis. That’s all I’m looking for. I know you’re taken.”

“Sure,” I said.

“You don’t mean that.”

“I do.”

“Ten bucks a game?”

I went home and practiced against the wall. About three, the kink creep started inside me and all I could think about was Trish’s tanned legs and fake Georgian accent. She worked at the bank until four, but I knew I couldn’t go there. Didn’t want to show up at her place unannounced and most certainly didn’t want to wait until the end of next month to get done again. I wrote my name and number on a piece of paper and wedged it into her back door. Some hornets had made a nest beneath the soffit. By six the phone rang.

“Hey baby,” she said.

“Hey,” I said.

There’s a point in any conversation when it becomes all about sex and we had already reached that point.

“What are you up to?” I said.

“Waiting for you.”

“When?”

“Give me half an hour. I have to get made up.” Then she paused. “Do you have a car?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Can you pick up a prescription for me at the drugstore?”

“Of course.”

“Then park out back, okay?”

When I went downstairs the air already reeked of hemp. Fleetwood Mac was on the stereo and some very nasty porn was on the huge television. A nude man slicked down with oil was being garroted by a woman in a witch costume.

“Hey hon,” the voice said from the off-suite.

“Hey,” I said.

“What to wear to a hanging,” Trish said and came out of the room in five-inch heels and a fishnet body suit. She wrapped her fingers over the doorframe and I knew I wasn’t going to have much say in what happened next.

A lot of the times I’d wake up the next day with a searing headache. My right eye would go out of focus. Rope burns too. I took to wearing high collar shirts to work which was stupid in the middle of July and everyone just assumed it was a hickey. One of the girls in the office kept giving me knowing grins. My short-term memory faltered, I’d been choked out four times in the past two weeks and I got pretty sure that Trish was probably hot waxing me while I was under. I got used to the after effects, but from time to time things got scary. Loud bells would go off in my head during hangings, shapes would flit by in the room so fast I couldn’t make out what they were, and often I heard people laughing above me when I was collapsed on the floor.

“Was there someone else in the room last night?” I asked Trish.

“Who?”

“I have no idea, who?”

She shook her head. “I don’t do that.”

“I thought I could hear voices. Up above.”

“That’s pretty common,” she said. We were watching a video from The House of Gaspers where a pretty blonde from Toronto pushes a man off a stack of telephone books and strings him up while wearing lace gloves. “Do you want to stay the night?”

That came down like a thistle in a corn dog.

“Uh, no,” I said. “Thanks, but I don’t think so.”

Trish put her hand on my knee.

“Okay,” she shrugged.

Pam had beat me three sets in a row and it was thirty degrees in the shade, which there was none of. She had on a white tennis top, white dress and one of those sweatbands around her head that people wear on Viagra commercials. Basically she was a poster girl for any Ivy League college in the country and I owed her thirty bucks.

“Give up?” she said.

“No, but I have to go.”

“Where?”

“Got a date.”

I bent over to pick up a stray ball and she struck me on the ass with the racket.

“You two spend a lot of time together,” she said.

“Do we?”

“You spend the night, don’t you?”

It wasn’t a question.

“Not often,” I said.

“Really?”

“That kind of stuff isn’t for me.”

“Don’t tell me,” she said. “You’re just in it for the sex.”

“Aren’t you?”

Pam went over and leaned against her red Volvo. Her skin was dark and covered in sweat.
“Yes,” she said. She opened the trunk and pulled out an ice sack. Inside there were two orange popsicles and she handed me one. “What’s on the agenda for today? If you can be so blunt.”

“Not sure,” I said. “Too rough for you, anyway.”

“Doubt that.”

“Mm.”

“No,” she said. “Call him.”

“She’ll say no.”

“He’ll say yes. He always does.”

“Not today.”

She opened the car door, took out her cell phone and tossed it to me.

“I know what you do and I know Tad. Call him.”

I dialed the number and waited.

“Hey hon,” she said.

“Hey, listen. I’m running a bit behind. Got to have a shower.”

“Come over sweaty. I like sweaty hunks. We can do a medieval scene.”

“Not this sweaty. Give me half an hour.”

“I’ll be ready when you get here,” she said.

Pam examined the threads on her racket then looked up.

“Hey, listen,” I said. “Is it all right if Pam comes over?”

“Pam?”

“She said she wanted to watch and that she knows what we do. I don’t know if you’d be into that or not.”

Trish thought for a long time.

“Whatever,” she said.

We had a shower at my place and Pam made a point of leaving the door open when she got wet. Everything that wasn’t freckles on that girl was red; lips, nipples, hair, even eyes when the bathroom light hit them the right way. Then she talked me into a scotch and soda and after we stuffed our tennis clothes into the trunk because she said she’d dry clean them for me. On the way over she gave me a litany of her asphyx experiences, which sounded canned, but the oil she’d smeared on her legs sparkled diamonds in the sun and I made a wrong turn at Trisha’s street.

“Better park around back,” she said.

“You know the routine, do you?”

“I know.”

I had this scene replaying in my head of Pam screwing me while I was choked out and knocked over a garbage can. The cottonwoods were drooping and covered in dust. The back alley hadn’t seen another car in days. We walked across the unkempt yard. The grass was long and yellow. A birdhouse once painted red was sun-worn to off-pink.

“She needs to do some yardwork,” I said.

“Too many hormones,” Pam said.

“Hormones?”

“They cut down on your desire to complete tasks.”

“Never had that problem with me.”

“Don’t shoot your load too fast, okay? I want to have some fun.”

We got up to the door and I had this bad feeling she might just mean screwing vanilla-style so I said, “Are you sure you’re into this?”

“Relax,” she said. “You have no idea. Don’t sweat it. It’ll all be good.”

But as soon as we got inside we both knew it wasn’t all good. A fan circling above the lonely dining room table made no noise. The air was stagnant. There was one plate, one teacup and one napkin. No stereo, no porn playing, no sounds of Trish clicking her shoes or buckling up the chrome latches on her leather corset.

“Trish?” I called out, no answer. “Hey hon, you ready yet?”

I realized I’d called her hon. Pam shuffled her purse between her palms checked the fridge and we went down the stairs. A newspaper from August, 1945 had been stuffed in the wall for insulation. At the playroom, the door was locked. Pam shot me a quick glance; I’d seen that glance on wheat buyers faces right before they knew the market was going to crash and I gazed through the window.

Trish was buckled down on her knees with the rope cinched around her neck. Her face was white as a mannequin and her dress was pulled down to her thighs. Something shriveled and pink had caught in the zipper.

Pam looked away for half a second and I panicked for a knife or anything to cut Trish down with. I was just about to pick up a screwdriver from the end table when Pam grabbed my arm.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Cutting her down.”

“Don’t go in there,” Pam said. “Jesus, she’s been dead for an hour.”

Not much doubt about that. The face utterly plastic, bloodless and strangely masculine stretched beneath the blue wig.

“We’ve got to do something,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Call someone.”

“Not here,” she said. She put a finger to her lip. “We’ll go down to the pay phone and call.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

Pam was whispering in a loud hoarse voice which was louder than if she’d been just talking.

“No, I’m very much in my mind. Not all my blood is in my dick. Listen to me and listen good. There’s no need for us to get tangled up here. She’s dead. I’m sorry for it but don’t want to spend the next five days answering a bunch of questions from the medical examiner and half-a-hundred cops.”

“We can’t just leave.”

“I am. You are too. Don’t touch anything. We’ll walk out the back door back to my car and leave. Nobody will even know we were here. Don’t be stupid.”

We walked out of the room, shut the door and walked through the caragana bushes. My mouth tasted of ash. In the small town dust bowl that was Trish’s neighbourhood only a magpie saw us ditch the screwdriver in a grain silo that had been deserted since 1953.

Pam stopped the car at the 7-Eleven because I was too shaky to drive. When there was no one around, she went to the phone booth and dialed the police non-emergency line. She took a piece of tinfoil from her purse and put it over the receiver.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m calling from out of town. I’m just in visiting. I got a phone call from a relative who’s got a lot of psychological problems. He didn’t sound right. Can you go and check on him? Nothing serious probably, but he has a history.”

She gave the address and then hung up. We drove to the tennis court and put on our sweaty, stinking whites and played tennis for the rest of the afternoon, and more than a few people saw us there batting the ball around and laughing and commented on what a handsome couple we were. »

SubTerrain » sandbox

Small, Malicious Planet

What were the odds? Her? Here?

Wexler has long forgotten her real name. When he dreams her, she’s either Catherine T., or the-most-beautiful-girl-in-the-world-you-just-want-to-take-home-and-scrub-clean. Because the last time Wexler saw her, almost twenty years ago now, there had been something distinctly cruddy about her despite that face, stunning with its origami angles and inset with otherworldly eyes that gave her the look of a startled Japanese anime character — Sailor Moon as squeegee kid.

The long, ash-blonde dreadlocks are gone, replaced by a brown bob. A mom hairdo. Or MAWM! as the Brady kids used to say. He sees no signs of the aggressive hardware that had jutted from her eyebrows, nose, and lower lip, or the tattoos that swarmed her exposed flesh. She’s not in the resort’s requisite sarong and bikini top but wears a pale-blue ladies golf shirt and a pair of well-ironed khaki shorts that look alarmingly like Tilleys. In fact, the woman standing beside Wexler’s beverage shack on this Southeast Asian beach is so straight-looking she could have stepped out of a CIBC pamphlet pushing flexible G.I.C.s. But he can tell from those eyes and those facial bones that it has to be her. Catherine T. An exfoliated, repurposed Catherine T.

Wex fusses with a plastic-pineapple-tipped toothpick, stabbing at some wayward maraschino cherries, afraid to look right at her. Because then she might say, “Where do I know you from?” And what could he tell her? That it wasn’t so much that he remembered, but that he simply couldn’t forget?

Just within earshot a local dealer is selling to some Swedish kids — some product no doubt laced with Black Bleach™ (aka phraxifor). “No Black Bleach!” the guy hisses in answer to one of the kid’s questions. Wexler should warn them, but, as usual, acting on impulse is more trouble than it’s worth – last time he interfered with a sale, he had his left shoulder dislocated. From somewhere further down the beach, as if to remind him that there is an all-knowing God but that he’s a sadistic bastard, someone starts to play “Meet on the Ledge” on a seriously beater guitar. Badly, but unmistakeably. Their song.

An iridescent green cherry, on the end of the toothpick in his shaking hand, glows like a small, malicious planet. A celestial body harbouring the genetic code for its own destruction deep within its chemically sweetened crystalline centre.

It was back in 1999, the late fall. It was Livin’ La Vida Loca, it was Fight Club, it was Columbine, it was Y2K. It could have been fin de siècle jitters, it could have been too much caffeine, but some people were worried that the world might end. There were those who actually thought this might be a good thing. Others insisted the new millennium wouldn’t start until 2001, so relax. In fact, 2001 was when things would start to get really freaky, but how was anyone to know that back then?

Wexler had to elbow his way through the usual throng of protestors to get to the doors of the Toronto headquarters of the Oryx & Crake building at King and Bay. A gangly guy who looked like an out-of-work molecular physicist slapped ineffectually at Wexler’s head with a “Global Goon Squad” placard. Two robust nuns — on closer inspection men in drag — sang, “How do you solve a problem like Oryx & Cray-ake?” while bouncing Wexler back and forth between their padded bosoms as if he was a hacky sack.

Oryx & Crake had gone, in a mere decade, from a small family-run pharmaceutical concern to a monopoly-gobbling, global behemoth. Some said the CEO — a woman with a nasal monotone and an unnerving Cheshire-cat smile — must have shaken hands with the devil himself. There were rumours the company was attempting to trademark the DNA of its shareholders, scraping away at the Canadian government’s feeble protective legislation and playing shinny with various international protocols. As Wexler crossed the spit-polished lobby, he could have sworn the twin busts of Watson and Crick mounted by the fleet of brass elevators both winked at him.

Up on the 28th floor the others were already drinking from oversized mugs and talking congenially among themselves. They didn’t look like the usual types who did the focus-group circuit for fifty bucks and the free coffee. Wex should know — over the past few months he’d done a dozen focus groups, including ones for a new talk-radio station pandering to lapsed New-Agers (too earnest), a rapping Ken doll, “Ice-K” (he’d borrowed a friend’s eight-year-old son who declared the product, “gay and creepy”), and Texas-style-BBQ-flavoured chewing gum (surprisingly good).

Wex felt as if he’d stumbled into an audition for Diesel or Dolce & Gabbana. These people were all freakishly attractive. There was a lean, pouty-lipped guy tossing back a classic Brideshead Revisited forelock. A skater kid with the skin of a baby and tousled, blue-tipped hair that perfectly matched his eyes. A preternaturally thin, bald Eurasian whose gender Wex couldn’t determine. An older woman who was a dead ringer for Susan Sarandon. An Ethiopian Susan Sarandon. And then her.

Warming her hands on her coffee mug was the most striking woman Wex had ever seen. Blonde dreads, an armoury of metal punched through her face, arms lush with tattoos, and a Catherine Tekakwitha t-shirt engulfing her small frame. The coffee steamed in tendrils around her face, wreathing it like an image on a Victorian Christmas card.

Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you? Wexler wondered. Are you the Iroquois Virgin? Are you the Lily of the Shores of the Mohawk River? Can I love you in my own way? He was giddily channelling Leonard Cohen, a nervous habit. When he did this, in his thoughts he actually sounded like Leonard Cohen.

He was interrupted by the efficient voice of the Oryx & Crake rep asking them to introduce themselves. Wex’s ears were still ringing with the reverb from Beautiful Losers, so he didn’t catch most of the others’ names. “Wexler,” he said. He never introduced himself as Wex. Not since Grade 5 when that substitute phys-ed teacher had smirked and asked, “As in Wascally Wabbit?”

Then Catherine T. said something like Suzanne, yes, Wex was sure it was Suzanne, although later when he will dream her it’s not words that come out of her mouth but something else altogether.

Wex hadn’t been paying attention to the Muzak piped into the room — it was just the usual white noise. But now a song was playing that was pleasantly familiar. Fairport Convention’s “Meet on the Ledge.” It had been his hippie mother’s favourite, even years after she traded her Jesus sandals for Reeboks. Catherine T. seemed to be humming along, bobbing her head. “Meet on the Ledge.” Wexler’s new favourite song.

“You’ve all signed your disclaimers?” the rep asked. She collected the forms and then held up a small Mylar bag and shook it. “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand.” Someone laughed, but it wasn’t actually funny, not in a ha-ha way. Oryx & Crake had been doing this lately, buying up the rights to classic slogans instead of doing its own creative, trafficking in second-hand nostalgia. Retro-branding.

“It’s candy?!” The Susan Sarandon look-alike sounded deflated. “I thought this was a drug company.”

The rep rattled the bag again. “We’re diversifying. Strictly over-the-counter ingredients. No Black Bleach,” she said, referring to the deadly street drug the company was rumoured to be trying to replicate in its labs, and winked. “Code-name Bliss. But go ahead, sample, and you tell me.” She slit the bag with her teeth and tossed it onto the middle of the table, small multi-coloured beads bounced madly across the glossy conference-room table like water in a hot pan.

Later, Wex would struggle to remember which colour he had first chosen. It tasted pleasant at first as he rolled it against his palate with his tongue, a silky texture and a cotton-candy flavour. Then his mouth filled with sand. He couldn’t speak, but his eyes were wide open. This is what it’s like to be in a coma, he thought, surprised by the clarity of his mind.

He could make out a startlingly violet bruise on the previously flawless neck of the angelic skate punk and a pallor that betrayed low white-blood-cell counts. Mr. Upper Canada College’s crisp, linen shirtsleeve was pinned up at the left shoulder, empty. The regal older woman’s already protruding eyes bulged even more, yellowed in their sockets, a rail-yard criss-crossed her inner arms. The androgynous Eurasian, expanded to the size of Jabba the Hutt, slumped in a jail cell, talking a stream of filth and nonsense. He would continue to see all of their damaged selves in the years to come whenever they invaded his dreams.

The fluorescent lights overhead squawked and wheeled about, dirty seabirds now, beach-combing for edible debris. Wex lifted his head from the sand and there was Catherine T. rockbound — his Andromeda chained to a cliff above the sea. A scaly creature lurched from the water, mythic, voracious, a Trump tower of serrated teeth and shipwrecked breath. Catherine T. opened her mouth and out came, not a scream, nothing so operatic, but a tiny person, curled like a fetus or a fiddlehead fern. She sent it drifting towards Wexler on a breeze, buoyant, still breathing. But Wex was no Perseus, no sandal-footed hero. It was all he could do to turn himself around, and run inland, as fast as he could, his quads clenching, breath sluggish in his pipes, cursing all those who would sacrifice their children to appease gods and monsters.

The lights above Wexler were humming almost inaudibly. The dreadlocked girl had her hand on his shoulder. “Are you diabetic?” she asked him. “Or was it just a sugar buzz?” He was drenched and slightly dizzy. She was leaning so close he could make out the components of her musky fug — sweat, patchouli, Jamaican beef patties, and jitter-bugging in and around it all something that smelled very much like fear. The others around the table looked mellow, blissed out. Wex’s hands cramped. Opening them, he saw he’d been gripping some of the candies so tightly the colours had run together, the red ones puddling in the middle as if he had blood on his hands. That, or stigmata.

How long, how far, can you run from a memory of the future?

Wexler, who turned thirty-nine last week, the same age Martin Luther King, Jr. was when he died (and Che Guevara and Fats Waller — all men of more ambition than Wex) makes a deal right here and now, standing on this remote beach, in this poor, beautiful, strife-torn country, with a mangled “Meet on the Ledge” wafting through the air, the Swedish kids tripping badly behind him, and Catherine T. off in the distance walking towards a stony outcropping that juts over the sea. He makes a deal, his heart in his mouth — as small and sour as a dried apricot — to do something. To stop running, to create something meaningful, to find someone to love, yes, to make a child even. To live.

His Mohawk saint appears rockbound now, one with the cliff, shading her eyes as she looks out over the ocean. The water has sucked far back from shore, leaving an expanse of virgin beach littered with gasping parrotfish, blue and black sea stars and harlequin shrimp. The colours are dizzying. Local children run and dance further and further out, giddy with the wonder of it all, spindly limbs pinwheeling. Only Wexler and Catherine T. see the water rise in a towering sheet, darkening the horizon, rushing towards them like a berserk colossus on a surfboard.

And Wex runs. Not inland as fast as he can, but towards the cavorting children, his arms spread wide, howling full-throated like the warrior he might have been in an altogether other life, in an altogether different time. »

SubTerrain » sandbox

Laundromat

“And you’re the only one
who knows the monster’s name . . .”
— Rae Spoon

I still hate doing my laundry around other people; the unmentionables, the noise, the children. I wrote to you from a laundromat before. Could you tell? Did it come out clean or littered with other people’s gossip and drama? Did I tell you about the girl from downstairs who asked me if you can reuse a condom that’s been through the washer and dryer?

I saw a photography show once on laundromats. Humans of New York sort of feel. Whenever I see art I think, I could do that. A friend once said that the point is not that there is talent in being able to do it but in thinking of doing it in the first place. I have been recording all of my ideas so that when someone does it I can tell her I did think of it too.

In university we had a program, “Letters for the Inside,” where prisoners would request information and we would do the research and write them back ¹. My first request was for Kevlar (bulletproof shirts). I wasn’t sure if this was kosher or not. We were only given rough outlines of off-limit topics. I did it anyway. So I know a lot about Kevlar. We were warned we weren’t allowed to be pen pals, however. There was a separate bleeding-heart liberal program for that.

Anyway, maybe you get so much fan mail you’ve forgotten me. Don’t forget me—it’s not fair. You are the one who is supposed to be punished. You are the one with the faulty moral compass. I am the one trembling and moving and being asked about condoms as if it were an accusation in itself. I am the one in hiding. You don’t even have to cook. I am searching for your humanity. My sexuality is under lock and key. Wi-Fi has been cut off; mail returned to sender.

I wish I could reopen your case and light a match to it. I wish for all this and more and to forget the sound of you snoring. I could never sleep. And still don’t. I used to use the washers and dryers (two of each) in the apartment building but once I found kids having sex in there. Also, it is slightly more expensive and doesn’t have any extra large loads.

Do female prisoners get as much fan mail or more? Do they get any? Orange is the New Black is now all the rage; lesbian sex, prison bars, poor misplaced white girl—who wouldn’t want a bite? Am I tempting you? I hate when people say we’re all in prison, not because of its truth but its stupidity. You always get me going on things like this. They have driven me out of two neighbourhoods now. It isn’t legal what they did but who can argue with a sexual abuse victim? How ironic, I am automatically attached to your name, your fame, your crime, and yet you will not even write back. I just want to know why.

I saw you as I sat in the pub. Someone threw nuts at your head. It was a slow night. All my nights these days are slow. I’m tired of seeing your face. Maybe prison is like art. I could have done it, too, but I didn’t. People watch the prison shows, however, to see how different we are. For that escapist thrill and the charge of moral superiority. I have given up on such judicial language. We all have locks.

I believe the girl who asked about the condoms is dating the guy I found outside one night, lying on the small patch of grass. I couldn’t tell if he was dead or passed out. I asked someone to find out for me, for I didn’t want to be the one to stir him. He said he was fine, and gave me a nasty look. A look like—mind your own business, lady. The same attitude I was given when I called the cops because it sounded like a bad fight in the apartment next door. Now I don’t bother. I don’t even comment on the condoms or the lewd graffiti (street art—ha) or sidewalk chalk. When I was a kid I never would have thought of such things. But to react to it is just reinforcement. So I try to ignore the lewdness. Eventually you don’t even have to try to ignore it, you just do. When I’m really stuck I bring up you. You are the answer to every dinner party in the ’burbs and in this hole, this laundromat. So much so that I no longer think you’re real. They probably aren’t sure, either. They could Google you. They probably have. Do you remember Google?

Perhaps I’ve been watching too many prison documentaries. So many pages, so many words, and still no resolution. Just more pages and more words. More silence. In Al-Anon we are to make lists of all the people we have harmed, which seems to be everyone we have ever met, and I said I wasn’t going to apologize for a life no one should have had to live anyway. As if the verdict is always guilty for everyone involved. They tell us to pray, that God can redeem us. Foolish me thought we were there because our exes and fathers were behind bars and treated beer as a sport. Amends. I don’t believe I even believe in the word anymore. Sounds like a new brand of vodka—I’m putting that on my list.

I remember—suddenly—I was supposed to buy groceries. Milk and bread and such. I remember you telling me how you’d get milk from Starbucks, filling up an empty cup. I can no longer stand Starbucks, it feels like everyone there is a clone and every drink is named after Oprah. Maybe people have a point—we’re all in prison. Selfpity is so lazy. Why is it that I love the word loathe, I mean, what does that say about me?
Favourite word, no doubt. It fills me up, takes up the space.

It is 2:00 am again and I don’t know what to ramble on about. Too much, not enough. I want to sleep forever but not sleep at all. I want to find your other letters—the ones I buried. I want to collect keychains from other countries. I don’t want to be strip-searched ever again—not even by you. I stare at the lined paper and the lines form bars, keeping the words in.

Now it is 2:17 am and something hurts. I don’t know how to explain. I don’t want to explain, but it hurts. And I’m remembering standing outside the metro, waiting for you. Pacing. And all the people going on with their lives. It was spring, I believe, but sometimes it seems like it was spring in every memory I have.

No one talks about this stage. People only talk about being young or old, no in-between. The old ones pointing fingers, the young ones with middle fingers. Somewhere in the middle life is just too uneventful. After the broken heart, before the grey hairs, after the weddings, before the funerals, there are the divorces. Maybe this is enough for now, all that’s left is debating between coffee and tea. At least, it would seem that’s all that’s left. I’ve got to do laundry, still.

Have you made your amends? I assume not, for I haven’t heard from you. I’d rather you didn’t, to be honest. Do it with the priest. It is raining hard here. You can’t go for a walk without being baptized. Can’t step outside without being free. So I stay here with my Canucks heated blanket and my Paul Auster collected prose. I know, I know—Go Leafs!

Sometimes I like watching the dryer, it does form a sort of dissociative fugue. I feel as I imagine cats do—focused, in the moment, perplexed by the mechanical movements and colours—waiting for the attack—some people think that it’s crazy to talk to cats. For me it seems entirely natural; more natural than answering the girl about the condom or the street art or the hooligan or you on the tv and the beer and the salted nuts and the carrot cake in the fridge given to me by an old friend. I still don’t know why. She did it as one does after a tragedy—a real tragedy—or when one buys a house next door—she stood at the door and I stood at the door for what seemed like an extremely long period of time. All this considered, who wouldn’t talk to her cat? I’m not sure we’re supposed to have pets but I also don’t think anyone cares.

I imagine your cell like a shoebox, I imagine you inside. I imagine you sharing it with a mouse. And a string to connect my telephone to you through a peephole. I picture all of this and more because you say nothing. You just stand like a totem pole in the midst of my life. You know that in Native customs you aren’t allowed to resurrect a fallen totem pole?

And I imagine our therapist—And how does that make you feel? I imagine us. That’s all you’ve left me—I feel fucking fantastic, doc.

I remember writing this before and so many other times, too many times to remember and I remember ice cream and fall leaves and movies but sometimes I’m not sure if I’m remembering a movie or remembering my life. I am writing to you, I remember that; do I remember that or do I know that? Words are strange, like bunnies that run around and make smaller bunnies and claw at wires and I’m angry about the bunnies and breaking every rule about writing letters.

Instead I live in a place where rage is a currency and everyone owes somebody an apology. Sometimes it’s better still to forget. Yes, this is one of those times. And I’m getting some of that coffee now. Really, I don’t remember, not at all. I wish I could forget you but not forgive. This is how it’s done— the orchestral version of silence—a page turn.

I’m remembering the first time the silence overtook me. This time you were the teacher, you replace every character in every memory. I was eating SpaghettiOs as a child and a feeling of deep shame and no understanding of why, and this image keeps reappearing and I want to go save her, go step in, but instead I don’t move. Perhaps I have also been replaced. That image of the thermos remains; the tiny desk, though it wouldn’t have seemed tiny at the time. And how I ran to the sink to throw up during silent reading time. But nothing around it, not before or after, just the thermos and the sink.

Tell me about your cell again and I will tell you about the laundromat and the coffee. I will tell you about the condoms and the neighbours and the Al-Anon meetings. I will tell you because I’m not telling God; I’m not asking for anyone to remove my character defects, I’m not asking to be saved, I’m just wanting to write. Wanting someone to know. My laundry is dirty and my words are in bars. »

_{1. Letters for the Inside is run out of Simon Fraser Public Interest Research Group (sfpirg), SFU’s student-based social justice resource centre.}

» Creative Non-Fiction

SubTerrain » sandbox

Curtains

1.
They were screening Opening Night, the John Cassavetes, at the Royal. It was Cassavetes’ birthday. Also my birthday. After the movie we were ushered out into the bitter December night and none of us could bring ourselves to leave straightaway. We huddled under the marquee, stiff-shouldered, rocking on our heels, producing crystal plumes that vanished on impact. Opening Night exhausted us: we needed to talk about it. The way people careen. The way the cameras and cuts carve out blinkered geographies. The way exposition blooms in elision. Of the three of us it was Anna who had the most to say. She proposed that Gena Rowlands, the Rowlands character, that is, was destroying herself to become a character, the character the Rowlands character, an actor, is playing on stage in Opening Night, alongside the Cassavetes character. Anna’s comment cut to the heart of something worth huddling about: we all, or me, at least, but let’s say we, destroy ourselves, wholly or in part, to fulfill roles set for us by us or by another or in collaboration, whether out of aspiration, projection or desperation. Though a self is a hard thing to kill. Opening Night is in part about acting, in part about aging, in part about being present, which in part involves accepting age, which might also be regarded, in part, as a thing that destroys us. “And now we’re destroying ourselves by freezing to fucking death out here,” Dov said, shaking his eyebrows for emphasis. Dov was going home with Anna. I was going home to be alone.

There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, perhaps exaggerated, about Laurence Olivier’s Othello. Olivier had been performing alongside Maggie Smith as Desdemona for four or five months when suddenly, for one magic night, everything seemed to come together, that perfect communion between actors collectively discovering the truth of the thing they’re making and an audience capable of receiving it. After the show, Maggie Smith found Olivier in his dressing room sobbing. “What could possibly be wrong?” she asked. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said. “It was perfect.” “I know,” Olivier replied. “It was perfect. And I don’t know why.”

Why does that night at the Royal keep coming back? It wasn’t the first time I’d seen Opening Night or the last. Dov is an actor, a wonderful actor. I was once an actor. Anna is not an actor. That screening, our exchange after that screening, forged an aperture, a punctum, as Roland Barthes put it. I saw something through Anna’s eyes I cannot now unsee. I see it all over the place. I see it in life’s muddle. I pass the first part of the pandemic revisiting films and see it clearly, exquisitely, in stories of actors (in one case a dancer), all of them women, inhabiting roles with varying ratios of ambition and repulsion, hubris and humility, desire and dread.

2.
“Time rushes by. Love rushes by. Life rushes by. But the red shoes dance on.” This is the impresario Lermontov summarizing the ballet based on Hans Christian Anderson’s The Red Shoes that will catapult his ingenue to stardom before toppling her headlong into the abyss. It’s also a summary of The Red Shoes, the postwar British film where Lermontov lives forever, which is also based on the Anderson. It was written, directed and produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and photographed in Technicolor by maestro Jack Cardiff, its every frame rich, almost fibrous, its reds and blues especially, its shadows like velvet: it’s beautiful. The sequence where we see the titular ballet is both theatre and cinema: a stage expands endlessly, inanimate objects get animated, edits compress space and time while allowing choreography to luxuriate. This Red Shoes is about an extraordinary young ballerina named Victoria Page, played by Scottish ballerina Moira Shearer, who gets discovered by taste-making tyrant Lermontov, played by Austrian actor Anton Walbrook, and is nurtured to become a great artist at the expense of virtually all else that might occupy a life. This Red Shoes is about spiritual seduction, romance without intimacy, ambition as narcotic, art as eros. Victoria possesses the depth and discipline to embody Lermontov’s vision, but when she falls in love with the company’s resident composer, when she attempts to cultivate a space that doesn’t surrender to dance, when she attempts to forge a boundary between art and life, she’s exiled. She’s eventually invited back, but a terrible, irreversible triangle has been drawn. Early in the film, in the scene where they first meet, Lermontov asks, “Why do you want to dance?” Victoria responds, “Why do you want to live?” So it’s a zero-sum game, yielding a tragedy that’s fabulous and truthful. In the end the curtain rises, the spotlight is empty, the red shoes dance alone.

Cassavetes says, “We’re making a picture about the inner life and nobody really believes that it can be put on the screen, including me, I don’t believe it either, but screw it.” Rowlands says, “Actors will do anything they have to do to get the part right.” Rowlands also says, “You know you’re not being lied to,” with Cassavetes’ films. As precise and composed as Cassavetes’ films are rough and tumble, The Red Shoes shares with Opening Night an excess of attention to behaviour that registers as tenderness. Cassavetes says his films are about love. Most all of us want to be seen. We’re terrified of being seen. Film directors, good ones, they see you. They see the you the film needs.

There’s a scene in The Red Shoes where Grisha, the choreographer, tells Lermontov, “You cannot alter human nature.” Lermontov replies, “I think you can do better than that: you can ignore it.” On a day when she and I were struggling to negotiate something that had long seemed unfathomable, a day that in retrospect presented itself as the start of a parting, a parting meant, in part, to recover something annihilated but instead resembled annihilation, Laura turned to me and said, “You have to accept your nature.” My friend Heidi says that our friend Carol says that there comes a point in every long love story where each lover must forgive the other for being who they are. There came a point in the middle of my life where I found myself working to recover the thing I’d worked to conceal during the first part of my life. Nina Simone sings, “Don’t you know you’re life itself?” Leonard Cohen sings, “Looks like freedom but it feels like death. It’s something in between, I guess.”

3.
I work weird hours, writing, delivering food. I revisit films, records, books. I rearrange furniture. Françoise Hardy sings, “Et ton silence trouble mon silence. Je ne sais pas d’où vient le mensonge. Est-ce de ta voix qui se tait?”

Here’s what we know about Elisabet Vogler. She’s a prominent actress. In the midst of her last performance as Elektra, she suddenly fell silent and looked about her as though a shadow passed over her grave. After a minute of this silence, Vogler continued with the performance and afterwards made light of the incident with her colleagues. The next day, however, she remained in bed, did not go to rehearsal, and has not spoken since. She has a husband and a child. As Persona, Ingmar Bergman’s bottomless mid-sixties masterpiece, begins, Vogler has been admitted to a sanitorium. Vogler’s doctor tells Vogler’s nurse, Alma, that Vogler is perfectly healthy, both physically and mentally: she simply will not speak. We know what we know about Vogler because Vogler’s doctor tells us. And because the film shows us: we see Vogler, in close-up, on stage, in her minute of silence, eyes wide and fearful, surrounded by darkness. We know what we know about Alma, the nurse, because Alma tells it to Vogler, unsolicited, because Vogler doesn’t speak so Alma needs to speak, or because Alma, at least fleetingly, believes herself to be of interest. Alma is twenty-five and engaged to marry. She completed her nursing certificate two years ago. Her mother was a nurse. She rarely goes to the theatre, but she thinks theatre is important. When alone with Vogler, when Alma’s not around, Vogler’s doctor suggests that Vogler is suffering a crisis of faith in her capacity to apprehend truth on and off stage, that she has a desire to be unmasked, even annihilated, that she’s not speaking because she cannot bear to speak another false word. When alone in bed and unable to sleep, Alma tells herself that her life is sorted, her future determined. It is as though she is reading her life as a script and all she needs to do is follow along. Later Alma says that Vogler could become her, could enter her, study her, like a role, but that Vogler’s soul would be too big for Alma’s body. Alma is Spanish for soul. When Alma offers Vogler a photograph of her child, she tears it in two.

As a boy I had no talent for sleep. I spent wee hours in front of the television with the sound down. I never napped. My mother napped every day and, on occasion, would take me to nap with her. She would drift off to sleep almost instantly. Not wanting to rouse her, I would lay beside her, rigid, immobilized, waiting. Later, sleeplessness arrived with thoughts of annihilation.
Vogler’s doctor sends Vogler and Alma away to the doctor’s cottage by the sea. Vogler and Alma traipse the beach, read, take photographs, write letters, harvest mushrooms, compare hands. Because Vogler doesn’t speak, Alma speaks. Because Vogler remains opaque, Alma turns ever more transparent. There’s a scene in which Vogler, seated on a bed, smoking a cigarette, wearing a white nightgown, listens, without expression and with great attention, while Alma, tipsy, tells of an episode in which she and her fiancé were holidaying at a remote beach, but the fiancé was away and Alma was sunbathing with a strange woman, and both Alma and the woman, aside from their broad straw hats, were naked, and both were approached by two boys and a spontaneous sexual encounter, which Alma describes in detail, ensued between the four of them. This scene, in which one listens while the other speaks, is among the most erotic scenes in the history of cinema, because of the story and because of the listening. You wonder whether anyone’s ever listened to Alma. Soon after this scene comes another that is also erotic, eerie-erotic, brimming with little mysteries, though it involves no story. In this scene Alma, too, is silent. It is a Swedish summer night, the light silvery. (Persona, photographed by the maestro Sven Nykvist in black and white, is largely a two-hander, its every interior sparse in furnishings and devoid of décor. It is almost exclusively interested in faces and light.) Alma, in white nightgown, is in bed sleeping or not sleeping. From behind transparent curtains, Vogler, in white nightgown, silently appears. She enters Alma’s room like a ghost. Alma rises or is compelled to rise. Before a mirror or a lens, Vogler stands behind Alma, sweeps her hair from her face. Vogler and Alma peer into the mirror or lens together, as though their two faces are but two facets of one face: a Janus face. As Persona continues, the boundaries of the two women turn porous. Small, meaningful acts of violence accumulate. Vogler removes her voice because she cannot speak truth. Alma can only speak truth. Vogler listens. Alma gives and Vogler takes. Until Alma gives more than Vogler can take.

In Persona’s prologue a boy reaches out to caress a screen on which the faces of Vogler and Alma, which is to say the gorgeous faces of actors Liv Ullman and Bibi Andersson, dissolve one into the other in soft focus. Bergman says Persona grew out of the image of two women comparing hands. Hands, we come to understand if we live long enough, are one of the parts of the body that betrays age. Laura used to perform a joke: she raises her hands in the air so the veins recede and says, “Princesa,” then she lowers her hands so the veins engorge and says, “Monstruo.” In the first part of Persona is a scene comprised of a single close-up of the face of Vogler, the face of Ullman, who Bergman fell in love with while making Persona, while looking at Ullman, and the light fades so slowly as to render that face a landscape. When we become involved with someone romantically, we say we’re seeing them. In Opening Night, an actor gets into a car and an ardent fan outside the car reaches out to place her hand on the window that separates them. Cassavetes says a great shot makes you want to reach out to touch the skin.

4.
I revisit films. I listen to records, read. I work weird hours. I rearrange furniture, find things to get rid of, take unexpected naps. Tom Waits sings, “All the lies that you tell, I believed them so well. Take them back, take them back to your red house, for that fearful leap into the dark.” I think about actors and acting and actors playing actors. Anne Carson asks, “Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you?” It may be true that we all destroy ourselves to fulfill roles, but that process is typically so incremental as to be undetectable, an emergency so gradual it consumes whole regions of a life. Stories of actors greatly accelerate this process: showtime waits for no one. Waits sings, “Who are you this time?”

Opening Night is about the slippage between staged drama and personal drama, a wild, precarious, wayward slippage, a headlong topple to find truth in artifice. Myrtle, the Rowlands character, is playing the role of Virginia in a play called The Second Woman. The play is in previews in New Haven. At the start of Opening Night, after one such preview, an ardent fan rushes to Myrtle, embraces her, tells her that she’s seventeen, tells her she loves her. The ardent fan follows as Myrtle gets into a car. Ardent fan places her hand on the window of the car, the transparent curtain separating ardent fan from Myrtle. Ardent fan follows the car on foot in the rain as it pulls away, then is struck by another car, and dies. Myrtle sabotages rehearsals and performances of The Second Woman. During one rehearsal, Myrtle lays on the floor and says, “No more.” During one performance, she goes off-script to remind the audience that they’re watching a play. Myrtle is haunted by the ardent fan, who died at seventeen, exactly the age Myrtle was when she felt that all her emotions were available to her. Myrtle hates the role of Virginia because Virginia is overtly middle-aged and feels some essential part of herself slipping away. Myrtle says Virginia is “very alien to me.” During one performance, Myrtle says to the audience, “Time’s a killer. Isn’t it, folks?” Myrtle hates Virginia because if Myrtle does a good job playing Virginia Myrtle fears she’ll forever after be seen as older. Rowlands was forty-seven when Opening Night was released. Virginia is Rowlands’ given name: Gena is short for Virginia. Opening Night was written by Cassavetes, who was also Rowlands’ husband, father to her children, and co-star in Opening Night, which was also directed and produced by Cassavetes. Cassavetes and Rowlands’ body of work together constitutes one of the greatest collaborations in the history of cinema. They saw each other. With its fascination with actors, process and theatre, with its invocation of a ghost as a means to explore internal torment, Opening Night, which was released as Bergman’s most productive years as a filmmaker were drawing to a close, is easily Cassavetes’ most Bergmanesque film. With his unruly, catch-as-catch-can approach to shooting, his meandering narratives and disregard for standards of craft, Cassavetes is not what you’d call a Bergmanesque film director. Bergman and Cassavetes are two of my favourite film directors and Opening Night is where they meet.

Myrtle says, “I seem to have lost the reality.” Like Vogler, Myrtle despairs that she’s lost touch with truth. Like Vogler, Myrtle is terrified by truth. The Second Woman’s playwright, a woman in her sixties, promises Myrtle that if she says Virginia’s lines, Virginia will appear. Which makes Virginia sound like a ghost by whom Myrtle is seeking to be possessed. Myrtle is already possessed by the ghost of the ardent fan, or by some internal other. Myrtle says, “I’ll do anything I can to make a character more authentic.” Which in this story means pushing violently against the seams of artifice. Which means submitting herself to the violence of the furious ghost of ardent fan, or a furious internal other: a second woman. Which means sleeping with the play’s director, Manny, who is also Myrtle’s ex, who is also re-married, making his new wife another kind of second woman, who is played by Ben Gazarra, who co-starred with Cassavetes in a film called Husbands written and directed by Cassavetes. Which means flying to New York to visit a spiritualist, played by Cassavetes’ mother, and then abandoning the séance the moment the lights go out. Which means drinking alone or in company in her hotel room, which is so vast it resembles a stage set. Which means wandering the city alone on the day of the show’s opening and drinking until she can hardly crawl, much less perform, but performing anyway, leading to the final section of Opening Night, a nerve-wracking, riveting high-wire act that, as Anna put it, feels like watching a woman destroy herself to play a role. “Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods,” Carson says. “In crisis their souls become visible.” A stagehand who adores Myrtle tells her he’s seen a lot of drunks, but he’s never seen anyone get as drunk as her and still perform.

I drifted away from acting when I was twenty-four. I continued to perform in a couple of my own plays, but I stopped auditioning. I felt unseen. I’ve since come to the conclusion that I was not capable, or rarely capable, on-purpose capable, of showing something of myself, of letting myself be seen. I only felt seen in quiet places, in intimacies, hidden from view but for a precious few. To be seen, I needed to be hidden.

Laura Linney says, “You struggle to find the play and then, one day, the play finds you.” I listen to records, revisit the films, push around the furniture. In love, one ‘you’ gets seen, while another ‘you’ gets hidden. Bob Dylan sings, “I don’t cheat on myself, I don’t run and hide.” Waits sings, “Time’s not your friend.”

5.

“Not to know yourself is dangerous, to that self and to others,” Rebecca Solnit writes. “Those who destroy, who cause great suffering, kill off some portion of themselves first, or hide from the knowledge of their acts and from their own emotion, and their internal landscape fills with partitions, caves, minefields, blank spots, pit traps, and more, a landscape turned against itself, a landscape that does not know itself, a landscape through which they may not travel.”

At the beginning of Clouds of Sils Maria, Maria Enders, a renowned star of stage and screen, is in transit. On a train going from Paris to Zürich, via her personal assistant Valentine, Maria learns that her old friend, Swiss playwright Wilhelm Melchior, who gave Maria her breakthrough role in a play and subsequent film adaptation called Maloja Snake, in whose honour she’s traveling to Zürich to accept an award, has died. What Maria and no one else will be told by Melchoir’s widow is that Melchoir, who was terminally ill, died by his own hand while overlooking the alpine valley where the strange phenomena that gave Maloja Snake its name, a serpentine cloud formation said to be a harbinger of bad things, occasionally, as though by its own caprice, appears. This valley, the site of Melchoir’s suicide, is near Melchoir’s house in Sils Maria, a remote settlement in the Swiss Alps where, some months after Melchoir’s death, Maria and Valentine will live as Maria prepares for a new production of Maloja Snake, more than two decades after the production of Maloja Snake that launched her career. In that earlier production, Maria played Sigrid, a young, single woman who is employed as the personal assistant of Helena, a woman who is twice her age and has a husband and children. Sigrid and Helena have a passionate, toxic affair that ends with Sigrid moving onto another job and another life, while Helena hikes out to the valley where the Maloja Snake occasionally appears, and there she disappears. In this new production Maria will play Helena. Maria is reluctant to take the role but is talked into it by its talented young director. “Helena scares me,” says Maria. “I feel too vulnerable for this.” While living in Sils Maria, Maria and Valentine spend a lot of time together, talking, drinking, eating, laughing, hiking, gambling, swimming, going to movies, running lines. “I wanna stay Sigrid,” Maria says. She says Helena is humiliated, pathetic, “defeated by age.” Valentine says Helena is sympathetic and complex. Maria weaponizes her laughter and talks down to Valentine, who is half Maria’s age. Valentine complains about Maria’s treatment of her, but Maria doesn’t change, or doesn’t change fast enough, and eventually Valentine hikes out to the valley where the Maloja Snake occasionally appears, and there she disappears.

I drifted away from acting when I was twenty-four. I felt unseen. Except in my own plays. At twenty-four I wrote and produced a play in which I played the protagonist, a protagonist who rarely speaks. He is a stranger, a traveler in an unnamed city, and everyone he meets believes him to be someone he is not, someone of great significance to their story, and in every case the protagonist, who is suffering from fatigue, hunger and a profound confusion, goes along with this, allowing others to believe he’s the one they’ve been waiting for. To be seen, I needed to be hidden in plain sight.

Maria is played by Juliette Binoche, who turned fifty the year of the film’s release. Valentine is played by Kristin Stewart, who turned twenty-four. Binoche is an actor of tremendous skill and insight who has become looser with age. She moves about more, her movements grounded in her core. Stewart was a fidgety actor and has become recursive and more interesting with age. Clouds of Sils Maria was written and directed by Olivier Assayas. When I interviewed Assayas and asked about the relationship between Clouds of Sils Maria and Persona, he said, “The moment I decided to make a movie about Juliette Binoche as an actress rehearsing a play, in this kind of rarified environment, I was already tiptoeing into Persona territory.” Persona, he said, “is not something you forget about or get rid of. It’s a ghost and it’s floating around.” Clouds of Sils Maria’s final image is one of light fading on Maria’s face, rendering it a landscape. As with Opening Night, Clouds of Sils Maria ends with the opening night of a play starring an actor who destroyed something to arrive at her performance, to apprehend some truth. The end of Clouds of Sils Maria reverses the end of Maloja Snake: the younger one disappears, while the older one moves on. 


Let’s say we, all of us, but some of us more than others, at some times more than others, destroy whole regions of a life. The child, spouse or sibling; the inmate, pilgrim or citizen; the stateless, racialized or indentured; the solider, shepherd or revolutionary; the patient, prosecutor or politician; which part do you destroy?

You cannot unsee what you’ve seen. You cannot be unseen once someone has seen you.

David Berman sings, “Are you honest when no one’s looking?” »


References:
Assayas, Olivier, Clouds of Sils Maria, 2014.
Bergman, Ingmar Persona, 1966.
Carson, Anne, Tragedy: A Curious Art Form, 2006.
Cassavetes, John, Opening Night, 1977.
Cohen, Leonard, “Closing Time,” 1992.
Dylan, Bob, “Most of the Time,” 1989.
Hardy, Françoise, La question, 1971.
Powell, Michael; Pressburger, Emeric, The Red Shoes, 1948.
Silver Jews, “Smith and Jones Forever,” 1998.
Simone, Nina, “Wild is the Wind,” 1966.
Solnit, Rebecca, The Faraway Nearby, 2013.
Waits, Tom, “Who Are You,” 1992.

SubTerrain » sandbox

Buddy

It was after midnight, I was tired, and all I wanted was to heat up the bowl of leftover perogies I had waiting patiently for me in the fridge. Instead I stood at the door to my apartment as my neighbour stood at his, eagerly trying to convince me to “share your Internet, buddy.”

He’d called me buddy. That wasn’t a good start to the pitch. I don’t find buddy to be an endearing term; I think its true purpose is in condescension, a placeholder noun for drunks, and a way to ease marks who are about to get ripped off — “Buddy, do you really think we’d sell you a Zune that didn’t work?” He told me about his cousin who had recently moved into his place and how much he loved the Internet. The same weary eyed cousin who everyday would bring all of his earthly belongings from their apartment to the shade of the tree in front of our building. There he’d set up a sad bazaar and sell the pieces that formed his material life for a reasonable price. Eventually he even got a clothing rack that held what I assumed was every swatch he owned that wasn’t on his body.

Because we were neighbours and he loved his cousin he was willing to give me $10 a month to share my Internet. He suggested we could just string a cable from my router, out my balcony door, and into his kitchen window. It would be that easy. I waited for him to crack — “Just fuckin’ with you, buddy!” But he didn’t and just stood there, swaying like a tetherball stuck in its final revolution around the pole. Did he really not know about Wifi? I said I’d think about it and went inside.

For days I dreaded running into him. Saying no wouldn’t even be the hard part, I pride myself on my creative kyboshing — I’d love to but my Mom and I have our weekly Law and Order: SVU Skype date tonight — it was the after, the post-no unknown that worried me. I hardly knew the man but had heard his temper banging and clattering through the walls numerous times before. What if he turned on me, and his unibrow, which was so thick and even his cousin could of used it as a knick-knack rack at the bazaar, folded like an accordion in rage?

That was probably a bit of an extreme hypothetical, mind you. It was actually a pretty innocent request. I’m sure his eyebrow would stay level and he’d accept my refusal politely. Neighbourly. I was probably not being neighbourly by denying him. I mean, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, I could just give him my Wi-fi password and pocket an easy ten bucks a month. That’s two tall cans and change to spare. There’s always the risk that his cousin is one of those people who for some inexplicable reason downloads porn instead of streaming it, which could potentially tie up my bandwidth, but that’s not the end of the world. That’s something I could layout in a few ground rules beforehand. Perhaps give him a list of preferred sites to visit — a top ten. I could probably even spice up the deal: one of his cousin’s paisley button-ups a month on top of those ten big ones.

I saw his cousin a few times in the days following our midnight encounter. He’d been fanning himself with an old whodunit as he stood behind the small folding table that acted as his storefront. He looked uncomfortable. Shifty. Like his underwear was riding. I felt for him. I couldn’t tell if I was feeling pity or shame. This middle-aged man had fallen to the point of living on his cousin’s couch, had to resort to selling the physical remnants of his life to survive, and I couldn’t even see past myself to let him have access to an online relief. The Internet was now a basic human right according to the U.N and I was depriving him of it. I was a tyrant. A twenty-something despot. I waved to him as I walked by, holding my open hand up and out for a little too long before realizing what I was doing and quickly pulling it back in. He gave me a slight nod and looked to the ground. Eye contact wasn’t allowed with the supreme leader.

A couple days later I came across his table set up a few blocks away on a grassy patch across the street from the SkyTrain station. The landlord must have had a talk with him — I imagine it would be tough to convince him it was still a casual weekend yard sale on a Wednesday. The shirt rack still didn’t have a dent in it. The clashing patterns of the fabrics were like one of those Magic Eye stereograms; I unfocused my vision to find the hidden image — a dachshund with glasses?

“See anything you like, buddy?” It wasn’t a dachshund. The cousin pulled a grip of shirts off the rack and held them out at his sides.

“What size are you?”

“No thanks.”

“Huh? You want medium? You look like large. No offense.”

“No, I mean, uh, I was just looking.”

“Ah, okay. Have good day then, buddy.” His eyes fell to his feet again. I felt like Kim Jong-un on a factory tour, just stopping in to make sure the people I was stripping of their rights and freedoms were making the lubiest of lube possible.


There was in fact a limit to how much sushi I could eat. The limit was a lot and I reached it like a triathlete with shin splints falling over the finish line. My body picketed the gluttonous amount of tuna, yam, and avocado, bubbling inside of me. Hey-ho, we won’t go!

At the front door to my building, standing between me and taking my internal protesters to porcelain court, was my neighbour. It had been over a week since I’d seen him and I had forgotten about his offer, his eyebrow, and his cousin who loved the Internet. I had to make my decision right there and the answer came quickly: I would say yes, I would share my Internet. I would grant his cousin the ability to get lost in ’90s nostalgia listicles and to buy peanut butter online.

His eyebrow rose like a church steeple as he opened the door. I readied my response.

“Do you live here?” He stepped in front of the entrance, protecting our building from me. I didn’t know what to say. I was fully prepared to accept this offer made to me by a man, my neighbour, who now apparently had no idea who I was.

“Yes. I do.” With a grunt he continued on inside and I followed him up the three flights of stairs and down the hallway to our apartment doors where we’d talked only days earlier. He looked at me briefly before going in, dead bolt locking with a clunk. That was it. He didn’t mention his cousin or the cable from my window to his. He said nothing. His eyebrow didn’t so much as quiver. I opened my laptop. Its video streaming was quick, its web pages were loading with unparalleled quickness, my bandwidth was high, and that’s the way it would stay. »

SubTerrain » sandbox

Youth Laid Waste

“Very early in my life it was too late.” —Marguerite Duras, The Lover

When I was a teenager I skipped school so much I’d get taken aside by my teachers and told I’d missed the most school of anyone in the history of our little Montreal-West, public-for-smart-kids prep school. I brushed them off and kept writing myself doctor’s notes and answering my phone in French when the school secretary called, pretending I was my mother, saying, “Yes, Melissa has another terrible tonsillitis, depression, stigmata, mononucleosis, but she should be back on her feet in a week.” I was still in band, on the school paper, got decent grades in enriched biology. But, having been raised by artist wolves, I was oftentimes overwhelmed by the normalcy of my peers’ day-to-day. Teenagers seemed like children to me, their mothers still bought them clothes and made sure they got haircuts and gave them curfews; sometimes their parents still cut up their apples into quarters to make it easier for them to eat with their braces. They went to camp, they knew how to play softball. I had no idea how to relate.

So I’d stay home and carve out some time for myself.

When I was in my mid-teens, after a series of unfortunate episodes, including one in which my stepmother tore up the side of my face with her thumbnail, muttering, “I hate you!”, I decided to move in with my mother full-time.

Although my mother had no permanent position, she made a living teaching art at both elementary schools all over the island and at a few universities in and around Montreal. She was out of the house in the fives each morning. I’d wait ’til she left—sleeping past dawn was not difficult for a teen. And then I’d run myself a bath. I’d put on my mother’s blue and white Japanese kimono, feeling bohemian and nearly-womanly. I’d reheat coffee from the morning’s pot. Eat a couple of teaspoonfuls of lemon curd from the jar. Play my mother’s The Best of Barbra Streisand record. Give a couple cursory glances to her ’70s women’s erotica—a.k.a. My Secret Garden—then leaf through her stash of ’70s craft magazines for outfit ideas. And then I’d head to the front of the apartment and flip on the computer—one of those Macs from the early ’90s, square and friendly as a miniature Westfalia—and start writing. I’d sit there totally blissed out from writing, a big cup of reheated filter coffee, my poorly self-cut, hennaed mess of orangey hair smelling strangely of herbs. Happy happy happy.

I wrote novels. A Judy Blume-inspired teenaged love story: The Shrimp. A horror novel—something gothic where a character went through a mirror and ended up in the water. And my masterpiece—my human-lady-loves-mermen novel in three parts, Of the Sea.

But even if I skipped school a lot I never got into any real trouble. I only ever got one detention in all of high school, and it was for wearing a mock turtleneck. (My geography teacher dragged me by the ear to the office and informed me that our agenda specified in the uniform regulations that only turtlenecks that folded over completely were permitted.) I was introverted and secretive and ultimately a bit of a goody-two-shoes. (Shortly after I graduated, I dated a guy from high school and he said his memory of me then was of me sitting on the floor by my locker reading fat books or giving speeches at assemblies.) Those days when I skipped school, stealing hours for myself, I was teaching myself to write. To look out the window of our apartment on Claremont at the tiny square of Mount-Royal we’d see from our front window and to keep on typing.

So it was a good habit. I learned to write.
It was a bad habit. I became a days-long daydreamer. A daydreaming addict. A lover of mind drift.

I took that dreaminess well into my twenties. What did I do with my twenties? I took a really long time getting a BA. I went to university part-time and paid my way through by working as a florist, nanny, advertising exec, translator, shwanky sweater folder to jazz soundtracks, ad hoc theatre helper, circus stage manager, furniture salesperson, and occasional interior designer. My writing goals were that maybe I’d publish some children’s literature at some point. And that maybe I could work part-time in a library or natural food store. I took weaving classes at a women’s craft centre and only learned years later that the centre was for women with serious learning disabilities. No wonder they thought I had talent.

I took flute lessons and oboe lessons and harp lessons and kept typing up bad novels on old typewriters. I smoked Captain Blacks and shopped for Virginia Woolf books at the Salvation Army, picking the Penguins from the Judith Krantz dregs (there is a copy of Scruples in every single charity shop). I rented foreign VHS cassettes and watched Royal Shakespeare adaptations of plays and learned about Ingmar Bergman and spent afternoons at the rep house in bizarrely concocted outfits that made me look homeless. I was a bougie little ragamuffin. Highbrow interests, low-fi duds.

And then in my late twenties I had a breakup that led to several years of me wanting to be romantically unattached.

I travelled a little. On a trip, someone asked me, in passing, why I hadn’t published much until then. I didn’t have a good enough answer. So I started to publish. And a year and some change later I was suddenly editor-in-chief of a bunch of publications, and I found myself on a business trip in the Caribbean. I couldn’t believe my writing had gotten me to an all-expenses-paid island sunset.

The more hustling became habit, the less I could account for all those dreamy hours of my youth. It wasn’t just the time I couldn’t get a handle on, but also that broad-spectrum aimlessness masked as curiosity, that lack of agency, that treading water.

My youth. It’s funny that it’s over.

For a while I didn’t have to do anything to look young. I was a similar agelessness for about fifteen years. And then all that overtime and catching up, all that newfound agency compacted across my face. My face has now hit some kind of midlife crest. Shall I wear my trousers rolled? Shall my laugh lines get injectables?

Marguerite Duras says, in The Lover, “my face hasn’t collapsed […] It’s kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste.”

I saw it happen to a friend of mine when she was twenty-seven. Her face just fell, suddenly. You never know when your middle-aged face will strike. Mine showed up a couple of months ago. I’m surprised to find that I mind.

I tried to perform my youth well in my late twenties, post-waking-from-my-daydreaminess. I made myself wear bikinis. I decked myself out in Salvation Army getups—if it made me laugh it was a great idea to wear. I drank with the guys until the lights came back on after last call. I forgot to eat and got scurvy. I squeaked home tipsy on my ten-dollar bike, staring at the star-filled sky, happy happy happy, propping myself with make-sure-you-live-it-up reminders. Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t.

I fight my daydreamy nature every day. The busier I am, the easier it is. And my dream has changed; it’s normy, now. Mostly because I’m still trying to catch up on normy (groceries, vitamins, matching clothes). But I miss the sound of a quietly ticking clock. The promise of public radio breaking up the day. Light casting itself in beams that move from one end of my crooked tiles to the other. Adding more hot water to the bath. Letting all the thoughts drift in and out, unattached, unrecorded. Blurring.

These days my partner lives away from our home, and as a result so much of my life is spent in my head, or with my cat. Or walking while still in my head. Being a humanity tourist. Watching people and all that they do. It’s so lively out there. Although I work full-time at an office and am finishing up a Master’s degree and I write and publish regularly, now—books, articles and one-offs—in a sense, there are, once more, few distinct markers to my days. Being alone a lot does that. Which is bad, and good.

But the main difference between this nearly-forty time and my early-twenties time is my impatience. If I’m not resting from writing or writing or earning a living or resting from earning a living then I feel, very urgently, that I’m wasting time. There’s a channelling of energy, a hunkering down, a focus, a terrifying panic that drives me now. A concrete realization of time running out. Partly fuelled by the big, big worry and shame that I fucked up my twenties. That I lollygagged. I’m scared more than anything of not living up to my potential—I know that I’m not. I’m scared of wasting more time. I’m scared I won’t notice how much I’ve wasted. »

» Featured

Vancouver 125

Our Special Van125 Poetry Issue (#59) features 125 poems inspired by the fine city of Vancouver. Includes work by Al Purdy, Earle Birney, Brad Cran, Roy Miki, Peter Mitham, Sachiko Murakami, Nedjo Rogers, Carleton Wilson, Alan Twigg, Brian Kaufman, Tom Osborne, Lakshmi Gill, Roy Kiyooka, Larissa Lai, Joanne Arnott, Renee Rodin, Daniel Zomparelli, Phillip Quinn, Ray Hsu, Patricia Smekal, George McWhirter, Sharon Thesen, Fred Wah, Phinder Dulai, Clint Burnham. Copies still available.

» Read more

» Poetry

SubTerrain » sandbox

Report from the Kingdom of the Afterlife

In the future, books of the past will be redacted
and digitized, to be read only by the criminally insane.
As the gulf between the present and what you imagined
the present would be swallows your wounded
baroque sensibilities, so the lines of the scribes will fade
unmetaphorically, into white noise. Puerile
and petulant adjectives will be the leftover things
from an excessive past where you once sat, pondering the broken air-
conditioning—a smaller brain inside a larger brain inside
a sacrosanct antechamber removed from a certain unimaginable
misrepresentation which was the feather-tipped leather whip
of the old poetics. You’d read one too many theories
that led you back only to the fact that you were educated.
We were all educated then, stoned, and not so unpleasantly famished.
Everyone drove a rusted-out Volvo and named their cat Flaubert.
That was before all this virtual fame—so many lives blurring inside
the touch of a touchscreen. So many minds up in the cloud.
The rest of us crazy, imprisoned, or soon-to-be dead

SubTerrain » sandbox

Normal

For my daughters Micah-Sophia and Rory Sarah

I’m fighting normal. I’m choreographing
this other dance, where you spin across
the floor and out the door while the other
kids are still jumping on the spot, popping up
to learn ballet. From an outsider’s eye,

you might call ours the dancing raccoon disco,
or perhaps we are the hip hop squirrel brigade.
The slippery salmon lovers of clouds? Or are we
the bears who hold up signs saying, Will work
for honey and funk! Find your totem.

There is no tradition I will hold you to.

What I’m saying is that I want you to keep moving
and I don’t care if it is in your body or your mind.

When the other kids pirouette, you are already
gone. You’ve sold your tutu and moved to Amsterdam.
You have woken on a beach in Vanuatu
and when the person you love says, I love you,
you have the confidence to say, I love me too
and that’s why I can love you back
ferociously in the language of red.

It’s simple really: I want to give you both the gift of yes.

The door is open and even though we are supposed to stay,
we are spinning across the floor
in violation of expectation and structure.

What I’m saying is: go barefoot. Or walk out
with a handstand. Live in possibility
and in constant proximity to desire.

Don’t just dream; burn your dreams.
Heat your life with that fire.

SubTerrain » sandbox

New Deadly Sins

A child of God from Tennessee told me I’m aging well.
It all comes back to big creature voice,
to the faith-shadow flinch beneath still water and quick water.
It’s what we know from the bitter,
like the scrawl at the Devon wood mill’s loading dock:
Patti I love! You. Please come home. Bob.
Love letter on the loading dock and God in the aging.
It’s why there are new sins now,
because too many are making do without god and these small miracles
in magic marker come home, catch the bird, cure the stove.

Last week the headlines claimed “Ideology Trumped Science at Texas Agency.”
This is why I wait late night for your long distance calls,
lean close to the receiver to hear the underwire slung with silence
when we speak as one or lose the words that keep the thought soft.
It’s why Prometheus may have been a pinko in the gap-spilled firelight,
called all sorts of things for cupping the flame, offering it.

Look, we’re all aging well. Come home.
Because there’s news in a strange language,
the seriousness clasped in the diphthong’s severed link.
It’s always another civil war, another IMF backroom deal.

The signal is freak light over these untranslatable hills
where the church bells la-la-la every half hour
and the wi-fi times out before it begins.
But news anchors in low-cut blouses believe
what I can’t understand.
Maybe it comes from pixels, from bells,
the voices perched on so much empty,
and these sins so tight around the neck.

Remember that time I fell on black ice?
The pain sparked God.
Not cupped but spilled.

SubTerrain » sandbox

their tossing ships

on this more traditional view, the self was to be
regarded as an enormous whisky vat, in which
experiences fermented quietly
until they were mellow and mature.
–Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem



the miraculous alcoholics capture and tap the enormous whisky vat
of the self, their dilated blood vessels, their staggering gait.
evading the brightwork, leaping athwartships,
their revelry, loutish yet stalwart, plaits
tradition with dangerous irrationality,
that reckless sedan of a catamaran
named the death of man. It’s true
pilots absorb booze more rapidly
at high altitudes, their livers tall castles
of milkthistle, but goats and louts half
sunk in stouts and moats,
peering out english murder holes
to shout, who knows where
there’s beer, or filled to
the brim with toasts,
might be true poet poltroons,
sloshed neptunes, tridentless,
allowing our subterranean,
previously-unheard-of selves
fluency, music, crisp exactitudes.

SubTerrain » sandbox

hoarse, whispering

kickin it out back the grocers on milk crates
laughing and passing sherry with the natives



near the burial garden did you steal their stone
by taking stock of these illicit images to guide



a strange traveler through the cedar chip tombs
abalone bowers and the pox of dead gems



what’s writ white is your repeated phantasm
get outa here you no good nah fat chance eh



butt-end of mop in my gut proof of strength
i’m not one of the grubs i’m my own butterfly



list of old debts as skulls in disavowed landfill
back rooms are for the harder digital stuff



deformed mattresses spring at night – muhaha
joyce taps his cane through bonnie sad wood



of sam beckett’s “whoroscope” and krapp’s taped
inanities hissed from the grate in gotham hand



of mother i have strayed too far to ably repeat
the couplets you echoed in my unconscious ear

SubTerrain » sandbox

When You Are Old

Life is a long time grieving, especially the first time.
The second time you try, and it’s all right, there’s less tears;
it’s a reunion you never thought would happen. Then
the call comes back: the hard line in the head that said

 

don’t kiss, don’t dance, don’t do that. And even drinking
is easier, somehow, like each sip was watered down with
berries and pills and ice. You never dreamed it
would be so easy. But this is your second time around,

 

and you’re used to feeling used, and you want to see
the people you thought were gone for good, and so you
lean toward the fat neck beside you, and you say kiss me
darling, I’m back for you, and you alone, and the trees




aren’t sad, are they? The air is a calm mourner, you say;
it doesn't need a wake to drink at. It doesn't need friends or
family. You're like the wind, you think. You don't need a friend.
You don't need another life. And so it ends.




SubTerrain » sandbox

A very small fairy tale


There was a little girl with an axe. She walked through the woods and the wolves avoided her, and when she got bored with walking, she built a fort out of skinny aspen trees and lived in it. She decorated the walls with the skeletons of animals and the skins of predators that got too close and the head of the woodsman who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Later, she was joined by the girl with a saw and the girl with a whip. The fort expanded a little and developed interesting corners. Small, sharp animals came to live with them.

The boy who stripped naked crawled through the low fort door and stood there, ignoring the smell and thinking vaguely about blood. When the girl with the axe and the girl with the whip backed him up to the wall, he said, “okay,” and closed his eyes.

This wasn’t that long ago, and it happened somewhere north of Saskatoon.



From Issue #51.

SubTerrain » sandbox

Weight Watchers

Buddha
signed up for
Weight Watchers
after his doctor said
he was borderline
diabetic.

“Nothing
tastes as good
as being thin feels,”
chanted the Weight
Watchers leader.

Buddha rolled
his eyes,
and the woman
who had earlier said
she was still
trying to lose her
pregnancy weight
saw him and
nudged her friend,
the large-breasted woman
in the red track suit.
They both gave him
dirty looks.

Buddha wondered if
he could get in trouble
at Weight Watchers.
He wondered
if he could get
kicked out.



From Issue #51.

SubTerrain » sandbox

My Jesus


I met him in college, no
not really a meeting. There
was a phone call on the dormitory phone
and I answered. No idea what was being said
from the other side. It was in a tongue
so thick with accent that I couldn’t get it. But
Rodriguez came across, and a list
of room numbers and names
posted next to the phone delivered the message.
“Jesus!” I yelled. “There’s a phone call
for Jesus!” And to the three guys in sweats,
“It’s for Jesus. Do you know where he is?”
“Rodriguez?” said another guy coming up
from the stairway. “Yes. I just saw him
on the road. His name is Hay-sus, Hay-sus
Rodriguez. Don’t call him Jesus.” “Okay,” I said.
“I’ll leave a note on his door to call his mother.”
“Mary,” another guy said. “I believe
his mother’s name is Mary?”
I taped a note on the outside of his door: “Jesus,
call home.”



Photo by George Omorean
From Issue #51.

» Book Reviews

SubTerrain » sandbox

Screen Captures: Film in the Age of Emergency

By Steven Lee Naish
New Star Books, 2021
208 pages
$20



It’s unusual for me to read the blurbs or press release that accompanies a book I plan to review. But with this book, it was nigh impossible to ignore the words of praise, as they fill the book’s opening pages. They may have detracted from my reading, as the essays surpass the praise they dish out. But, as we’ve all come to say with a shrug, Whatever.

The opening essay stands as proof that this book isn’t in need of up-front songs of praise. In just a few pages, we witness the deconstruction of comic-book heroes, the one percent super-rich, and even the capitalist system. These ideas push us into the forthcoming chapters which deal with everything from Covid-19 to Hunter S. Thompson. Yes, he covers a lot of ground.

One of the book’s delights is that you don’t need to read it front to back. I suggest that you scroll through the chapters and first check out ‘The Watchlist’ at the end of each essay. Once you find your niche – or a list of films you’re somewhat familiar with – dive into the connected piece. And note that I say “somewhat familiar” as many of the films on his lists are quite obscure (though really, that’s a good thing, one that opens new doors).

The list most familiar to readers is probably the one that considers Star Wars. I remember seeing the ’77 release first run, from the front row of the Stanley Theatre in Vancouver. While I initially saw it as a more-than-clever riff on the old Flash Gordon flics, as it expanded to its full nine episodes and even beyond those, it became clear that Star Wars was providing a collective touchstone for our time. Naish delves into cultural and political ramifications of the films, going beyond, I can’t help but suspect, what even George Lucas likely envisioned. But then, that’s the task of a cultural critic: to lead us into thinking new thoughts.

While I expected Naish to explore the Star Wars saga, granting it a gravitas I’d not considered, that essay grounded me for going forward into some of the darker corners he explores. Time-wise, one of the most encompassing essays is ‘The Middle Word in Life’ in which he discusses films that span from 1969’s Easy Rider through the decades, to three features from 1986 (River’s Edge, Blue Velvet, and Hoosiers), and into the 21st century with a look at several documentaries – one on Dennis Hopper and two about David Lynch.

And if exploring the work of icons such as Hopper and Lynch isn’t enough, he devotes an entire chapter to Nicolas Cage, an actor who I think has displayed the broadest range of talent and taste in the roles he’s taken. Naish seems to express a similar ambiguity about him. In writing about Mandy, a 2018 film I managed to miss, he offers: “Any other actor might have found the nexus of emotion and seriousness in the character’s situation difficult to play straight, but with Cage as [the character] Red, it is played out with delirious lunacy.” [my italics] Amen.

While for the most part, I accepted the many paths these essays take, I was most surprised by the inclusion of the American Pie franchise – not especially worthy, I’d have thought, but Naish has convinced me otherwise. And whether it’s teen horniness, interstellar empires at war, or downright creepy nightmare-inducing horrors, he’s made significant comment on so many aspects of current culture, down to the fact that so much of “Our lives are now being fully captured by screens.”

He further states that the very nature of the cinematic experience is changing, something I’m not altogether convinced is such a good thing. Certainly if I were a theatre-owner, I would have been pissed off by the fact that the autumn 2021 feature Red Notice, a crim-buddy flic (Ryan Reynolds and Dwayne Johnson) played in cinemas for barely two weeks before being released on Netflix. So much for encouraging any live, paying audience.

But whether for good or bad, plus ça change is the state of flux we must accept. And if Stephen Lee Naish might sometimes come off as a little bit lofty in what he says, he has managed to raise the bar, something that can be good for all of us now and then – much more sustaining than concession-stand popcorn. »

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Practical Anxiety

by Heidi Greco
Inanna Publications, 2018
104 pages
$18.95



Practical Anxiety is a book of wonders and dreams, questions and calls to action, meditation, eulogy and prayer, sometimes with all of these elements acting at once. The title offers multiple meanings: there are anxieties about the practicalities of the everyday — bills, traffic, Jell-O sticking to the wall of a fridge; then there are more looming fears that are arguably practical to carry, practical as in necessary, like fearing for the disappearance of caribou and salmon, clean waters and forests. From religion, politics, class injustice and climate change to gender and relationships, ageing and housework, Heidi Greco dives into anxieties of different kinds, all with breathtaking results — breathtakingly beautiful and breathtaking like a panic attack.
While panic pulses throughout the collection, Greco gives us glimmers of hope, as in “Beatitudes for the 21st century,” where the spirits of recyclers “shall dwell in trees,” where the “sweet-natured . . . shall come back as bees.” There is also plenty of humour — “Truthfully, he looked like a bit of a goof. But a nice one,” says the speaker in the most lovable depiction of God I’ve ever encountered. In another poem a woman is irked by a comment from her partner and channels her rage into washing dishes, takes “solace from cutlery . . . considers the / relative uses of knives, wielders of final pronouncements.” This piece is an anthem I intend to display by my kitchen sink!

There are just a couple of spots where I could’ve used smoother transitions, but for the most part this collection is impeccable. The language used to describe the natural world is the perfect language with which to describe the writing itself: each word and its placement is like the salmon laying her eggs “in the secrecy of gravel,” each “private stone” carefully selected. As a reader I’m pulled into the poems’ pounding current, so that I too am swimming in a dream, “thrusting my body upward / hurling myself, stretching, / to climb the watery structure, / falling back again, / again, / again.” Greco’s voice is the moon she writes of, its “pale light a beacon to be learned,” with a “tone long and clear / cool and blue.” Her poems are “trees that rise / high as guiding stars, sprawling constellations to point the way.”

Greco rescues the text from preachiness by incriminating herself in some of the poems. She mourns for murdered trees “mashed to pulp for paper” to be used for “nothing more substantial / than flimsy words like these, light enough / to float on wind, disappear in a whim of flame.” She is gifted an African violet she “will surely kill by June.” Driving past a male hitchhiker who “should have his own car, his own stink of fuel,” her thoughts turn to roses in snow, cold “against that white, pink as lonesome thumbs.”

Impressive is the author’s attention to anxiety at different ages. There are childhood fears of sinister sugar plum fairies, mean butchers and schoolkids, then there are adults who keep their pantries overstocked for disasters. There’s “the brown-haired girl, sitting / in the toilet stall, looking / at the red mistake / smeared on her underpants” as well as the adult with “[p]inkest strains of maybe-blood in yesterday morning’s pee.” There is the woman who must bid her mother goodbye and the one who studies older bodies in the pool’s change room, coming to recognize different surgical scars, copies the women’s careful movements, “these subtle choreographies.” Nightmares have no age limit, they continue in images of polar bears like fish, “swarming in a sea gone soupy warm,” “swirls of purple starfish / adorned with too many arms, crabs who run insane / as if their heads have been chopped off, / churning spirals of ever-tightening circles.” A nursery rhyme tails a salmon’s journey to estuary, “where river meets the sea / and ocean rises, rinsing itself, merging wet worlds.”

Practical or not, anxiety’s never looked so gorgeous. »

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Refuse: CanLit in Ruins

Edited by Hannah McGregor, Julie Rak, and Erin Wunker
Book*hug, 2018
218 pages
$25.00



I’m conflicted about Refuse. I can’t decide whether sporadic admiration for the punchy, manifesto style of the collection outweighs my irritation at the compulsory generalizations and hyperboles that its signature rhetorical features. I’ve made more markings on the pages—underlines, circles, arrows, irritable counterpoints, even exclamatory profanities — than I’ve done in any other book on Canadian Literature, but I suppose this degree of frustration may be indicative of an engaging read.

Refuse attracted considerable interest even before it was published because it’s a decidedly polemical postscript to “a series of controversies and scandals” that marked Canadian culture a few years ago. The Steven Galloway affair at UBC looms large as the lynchpin of the entire rotten system called CanLit, specifically the formation of UBCAccountable and the November 2016 signed by 89 writers in support of Galloway, who was fired from his post as Creative Writing Program Chair for what the school called “serious allegations” concerning harassment and abuse. This overdetermined controversy, in turn, is augmented by a trio of similar private and institutional scandals, namely the allegations of sexual harassment at Concordia, the Niedzvecki cultural appropriation scandal, and the debate on Joseph Boyden’s indigenous identity. After these outrages, the three editors claim in their introduction, “the signifier ‘CanLit’ currently lies in ruins.” Further, these historical incidents compel a discussion of larger, systemic problems, namely that “[t]he intersections of rape culture, anti-Indigenous violence and cultural appropriation, and anti-Blackness seem to permeate CanLit.” And so the book goes the loaded rhetorical question the editors ask in stark, binary terms: “is CanLit redeemable, or should we burn it down?”

The irritation I encountered reading Refuse was likely the result of simple disorientation at the litany of problems it articulates. Is the book targeting the particulars of L’affaire Galloway or the universal myths that go into the formation of any abstract cultural noun like CanLit? Or maybe it’s the deep state of economic forces that enable a national or literary culture to happen in the first place? On one page of “Living in the Ruins,” the editors unpack the expression “CanLit” and suggest it’s too simple to represent “an industry, a cultural field, and an academic discipline”; one page later, they claim CanLit “still clings to a notion of the literary that excludes a lot of the stuff a lot of Canadians like to read”, like Harlequin Romances, children literature and graphic novels; on another, they boldly state that Canada and its literature were “built on the same foundation of Indigenous genocide, anti-Blackness, anglophone dominance, racist immigration policies, eugenicist attitudes toward disabled people, and deep-rooted misogyny.” Academics do love problematize things, but sometimes these lists of grievances, particularly when they’re not always supported by analysis, sound like overkill, as in this sentence where the editors are doing their obligatory academic due diligence of checking their privileges as “able-bodies cis white women with stable jobs”: “White saviours with good, liberal intensions are part of the problem in CanLit, because they can speak over BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Colour), LGBTQ2S+, and disabled people very easily, and mainstream Canada listens to them more carefully and closely.” Okay, so cultures have this nasty habit defining themselves against those it excludes but calling it out as an ism-based privileging of one over the other doesn’t always amount to much outside grad school. It’s like Simone De Beauvoir says, “the category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself … no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself.”

According to the back cover, this collection “works to avoid a single metanarrative” and brings together “a cacophonous and transformative multitude of voices,” most contributions are similar in their censorious positions. Gwen Benaway’s poem “But I Still Like,” for example, is a solid work from a formalist perspective, one that I could imagine teaching though I’d be stymied by what to do with lines like “our legendary writers / moonlight as rape apologists” and “can lit is cis lit.” Marie Carriere’s essay, which also happens to be one of my favourites because it doesn’t reiterate the PC habit of mentioning every identity except economic class, opens with an invocation of the “horror show” concerning white neoliberals and alt-right defenders of “free speech” in the case of Laurier teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd, who upset her administration and many online commentators in 2016 for screening a Jordan Petersen video. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t quite see how this issue, or many of the others in the collection, line up and connect to CanLit. Hence the irritation. When I listen to the CBC Canada Reads, my first response isn’t to finger-wag the radio for excluding more works than they include, when I read about Margaret Atwood’s “survival” motif or Northrop Frye’s “Garrison Mentality” archetype, both stock metaphors in old-fashioned CanLit teaching, I don’t scream “colonial violence!”, and when I hear news reports about a teacher and employee facing serious allegations I don’t respond by saying “rape culture” and I don’t disregard legal fictions of “due process,” the principle that a person’s procedural rights are entitled under Canadian law but in Refuse derogated as “a narrow idea”, and the presumption of innocence, the right encoded in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms that “Any person charged with an offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty according to law.”

Though my disorientation reading through Refuse was steady, it was by no means impossible to pinpoint moments of reflective thoughtfulness among the trigger-happy cacophony of plaintive voices. Carriere’s essay, which I’ve already said is notable for its inclusion of class, may have shifted my thinking with her explanation that calling attention to “settler occupancy of treaty or unceded ancestral lands”, which I admit I’ve always I found hollow liberal talk, is a “speech act” that just may be teaching us that “saying so is not nearly enough.” Thom’s East Van trans poem warrants mention here, too, because amid the surly word bullets aimed at “white people” and their “settler colonial project”, it’s light, even funny: “i mean, seriously / crack open ‘CanLit’ / how many skinny Chinese fags / can you find? … and how many sad white women / languishing exquisitely / in rural towns / … i rest my case.” Point taken. Perhaps the most effective essay, one which thankfully invokes the language of unionism at least as much as it does the trending identity-monikers of academese, belongs to Dorothy Ellen Palmer who, in her a critique of the UBCAccountable CanLit “glitterati” signatories, offers one of the most sensible sentences in the collection: “They aren’t in the union and don’t want to be. They snuggle up to power to benefit from its glow.” Although I simply don’t believe that all those who signed that letter want to “snuggle” with literary power, Palmer’s piece did make me wonder if the same “glitterati” would defend a less illustrious teacher whose name doesn’t register on the CanLit radar and who works at a run of the mill teaching institution. I certainly wouldn’t expect an outpouring of grief and calls for justice if I had these allegations launched at me by a student, but then I also know that such allegations have a way of destabilizing careers from their first articulation. Palmer’s contribution, like those by Lorraine York, Laura Moss, and Tanis McDonald, who writes a solid analysis of the metaphor of class war which framed media coverage of the UBCAccountable.

Given the nature of these controversies in the years immediately preceding #MeToo, there are good reasons for the hyperbole, and given that most public discussion about the scandals occurred in the attention economy of social media platforms, there are reasons for the plaintiff overkill, too. As much as I want to understand the collection’s central grievance here — against Galloway — I don’t. Most reviews I’ve read and podcasts I’ve heard are positive, and reviewers on Goodreads have given it an average of 4.29 stars, so I imagine it’s doing something right. Maybe I missed something or maybe I’m another white male heterosexual settler from some old guard resisting change because it threatens my privilege? As much as I want to take the side of the oppressed, which in my job as a teacher I’m supposed to do, I can’t quite move beyond thinking that allegations are not charges and complaints are not convictions. I can, however, say that it’s entirely possible to inhabit a contradiction, in the classic Marxist manner, and be irritated by a text that is also engaging. »

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Summer of the Horse

by Donna Kane
Lost Moose Books (an imprint of Harbour Publishing), 2018; 224 pages; $19.95



Although Donna Kane’s book calls itself a memoir, it’s a whole lot more than the usual look back on a life. She looks back, yes, but in doing so, she also looks ahead. If this sounds complicated, it isn’t — no more complicated than learning to ride — or, as Kane learns to express it, “to sit a horse.” As she recounts how she learned to overcome her hesitant ways around horses, she learns many other lessons too — about herself (trying to overcome her perfectionism, one of those traits too many of us drag around), about the wildness of the Northern BC landscape, about the various forms of wildness within herself.



An almost-chance encounter with a man leads to a relationship that she, a middle-aged woman with grown children, might not have imagined: “Never have I put my body beside a man’s and had it fit so well. Bespoke…You turn toward the back of me; I turn toward the back of you. I am home.”



Her new partner, Wayne, is a trail guide in Northern BC’s Muskwa-Kechika protected area, a region that’s about the size of Ireland and that’s known by some as the “Serengeti of the North.” Wayne is one of the reasons the area has gained protected status, and he is fierce about ensuring it stays that way. Kane, though a lifelong Northerner (astounded when she reflects that she and Wayne spent their lives barely an hour away from each other), learns much from him, including how to love again.



This book is about learning to pardon oneself for mistakes made, and about forgiveness and acceptance of others. Most of all, it’s a book about healing — a healing that begins when she needs to spend a summer treating the wounds of a badly-injured horse but it’s a healing that carries into levels of her own personal healing.



A fine poet, with several books and awards under her belt, Kane knows how to put words to work. Some of her descriptions of scenery or wildlife could stand as small poems on their own. Consider this portrait in miniature of “…a tiny grey moth resting with its wings fully opened…which appears as a shred of wasp nest, a flake of hammered silver.” Yet upon taking off her glasses, it “…becomes startlingly clear. I can see the lacework of the moth’s wings, a brindled filigree like the tail feathers of a grouse, a striped fan of brown and white trimmed in copper. I can see the moth’s face, two bright eyes like minuscule beads of oil on a head small as a grain of sand.” Among her gifts to the reader are these close looks at things, whether delicate alpine flowers or the patch of torn flesh on a horse’s back.



There are chapters that could stand alone, as meditations on simple objects. My favourite of these is the chapter on horseshoes, a topic I knew almost nothing about, beyond the childhood scar on my shin from an out-of-control backyard game that involved tossing them.



A memoir? To be sure, but it’s also much more — a paean to the outdoors, a plea for the environment, a chronicle of several layers of healing. Heck, it’s even a darn good love story. »

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Stranger on a Strange Island

by Grant Buday
New Star Books, 2011
80 pp.; $19



The front cover picture of Grant Buday’s 2011 Mayne Island memoir, Stranger on a Strange Island, announces the tone of its innards unambiguously: a metallic light grey Airstream trailer, detached, foregrounds a patch of island forest. The Gulf Islands have long been associated with romantic getaways, spiritual transformations, and pulchritudinous seascapes, but just months into an ongoing eight-year stay on tiny Mayne, those visions have closed like eyes poked by Moe the head Stooge: “November arrived. The clocks were rolled back and the rain began to fall—and fall . . . What with black clouds overhead, tall trees all around, and no street lights, it felt positively medieval. By three in the afternoon it was twilight, by four dark, by five so cave-black I needed a flashlight to venture out the door. What was all that about a third less rain?” To be clear, the Buday family’s move from Vancouver to Mayne was undertaken more out of economic pressure than idealistic stance, but an intriguing pull in Buday’s rumination is one between mundane necessity and spiritual hope. An initial job of helping an employer relocate an illegally moored boat involves this non-postcard entry: “My wet denim stuck to me like depression, my pale and frozen hands resembled bled pork, my back was in spasm. As for my teeth, I was clenching them so tightly against the cold that I feared for my dental work.” Yet the book’s last chapter, of the author’s whale watching excursion with his eight-year-old son, culminates in grace: “she jumped high, surging out of the water with no warning, right up into the air, that bus-sized beast performing a pirouette in the bright sunshine . . . The entire ship seemed to stagger. But there she was, twenty tonnes of mammal only twenty metres away, suspended in one glittering airborne moment, a greeting from another world.”

It’s not all angst and wonder. Humour, wit, irony, and satire abound, and are incorporated into the anecdotes with the natural aplomb of a head cook festooning a three-tiered cake with baroque curlicues. Buday is a terrifically funny writer. Past efforts in short stories, novels, and travel essays have shown his gift for uproarious yet accurate simile, believable punch-line dialogue, coarse slapstick, and situational disjunction, all of it delivered in unassuming voice and smooth transition. Here, Buday is able to display a more relaxed tone, a conversational wisdom for his deprecatory, occasionally caustic, humour. The mood is at times melancholic, yet the language is spry and engaging; the autobiographical persona is a maladroit foil to Mr. Handyman, yet there’s satisfaction and even defiance in a low-tech pullback. Buday seamlessly interweaves personal interaction with natural description, fascinating allusion with fictive hijinks (the chapter on Mayne Island’s founding), and biographical excavation with incisive psychological speculation. Some may not take to Buday’s penchant for balloon puncturing, but it’s a necessary universal endeavour, and one that yields its own occasional epiphanies, all the more earned for being honest and tenaciously persued: “The tree hesitated, creaked slowly, creaked loudly, and began to tilt. With the solemn grandeur unique to the enormous, the cedar began to splinter and groan as it gained momentum. The whole world seemed to be toppling. The tree pitched forward then struck the ground with a whamp! And lo, light did flood through the newly opened gap in the forest.” »

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Lust Series

by Stephanie Dickinson
Spuyten Duyvil, 2011
70 pp.; $10



Picking up Stephanie Dickinson’s Lust Series I could hear a faint rumble of insecurity from somewhere inside of me. The format of this collection of short prose pieces (most are less than a page) reminded me of the time I spent wading—no floundering—my way through Nicole Brossard’s largely inaccessible Picture Theory during my final year of an English Honours degree.

I soon found that I had no reason to fear Dickinson. Her prose, though it emphasizes language over narrative, is not only accessible; it is an explosion of life staining page after page with the ecstatic gore of everyday passions, obsessions and indiscretions. Dickinson’s themes cover the gamut of sex, nature, violence, death, love, poverty, and incest, but in spite of the grit of these themes, her work isn’t the usual urban, nihilistic writing of existential despair. Instead her words are animated, full of life, as though taking their cue from the carnal deeds described within the slim seventy pages of this work.

The episodes that take place on each page provide vivid immersions in a visceral, fully realized world where the animal-nature of being human is laid bare through interactions that are sensual, titillating and, at times, perverse.

The first page describes a scene that is eerily reminiscent of 9/11 (though without mentioning this event). Dickinson begins by writing about the city as it’s inhabited by “the homeless who threw themselves (down) on futon cushions…I kissed my lips into garbage cans…whiff of reefer, marrow of decomposing Pampers…” And in that sordid environment, she adds, “Blocks away bodies were burning away to soul and in the air voices cried out Tell us how to stay alive…A gaping hole people were falling from.” This juxtaposition of squalor, death and yearning for life is typical of Dickinson’s strange ability to knit together seamlessly worlds that contain the whole spectrum of both beauty and extreme ugliness in a writing style that is richly evocative, utterly empathic and terribly perspicacious.

In another section, Dickinson describes, with great compassion, an incestuous relationship between brother and sister. While exploring this transgressive relationship, Dickinson also makes it compelling and loving: “We fall asleep wrapped around each other and maybe we’ll wake with the sheet iced to our skin or better yet to not wake and our last touch frozen solid my fingers to his lips.” Through her rich understanding of the dark secrets of the human heart Dickinson conveys, with authenticity, all of the perversion, the torrid passion as well as the tragic gentleness of this relationship.

Even without an obvious linking narrative, each piece in this work is thematically connected with language that Dickinson bleeds out, spits out onto the page in a way that is at times percussive, always emotionally salient and perceptive in a way that resists pedantry, and retains its emphasis on language over plot without becoming ethereal or overly academic. Dickinson’s writing is primal, powerful, and original. »

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The Inverted Gaze: Queering the French Literary Classics in America

By Francois Cusset
Translated by David Homel
Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011;
146 pp.; $17.95



Francois Cusset, a professor of American Studies at the University of Paris, has written The Inverted Gaze: Queering the French Literary Classics in America, a book that is nominally concerned with how French literature is being taught in those boroughs of North American academia where “queer theory” flourishes. Cusset takes pains to explain how “Queerory” differs radically from the more conservative tradition of “gay studies.” His book is in some respects a polemic directed against the French “gay intellectual establishment,” which, says Cusset, has attacked him “a traitor to the gay and lesbian cause.” (The old-line scholars were allegedly outraged not only by the contents of Professor Cusset’s earlier work, French Theory, but by the fact that it was printed with a pink cover.) The Inverted Gaze issues a strident call for “a new lexicon, a code of affinities that will frighten our Sorbonne guardians . . .”

“Queerory had no small ambitions,” Cusset says of the radical critical movement that originated in Michel Foucault’s “sexual constructivism” and a seminal 1990 essay by Teresa de Lauretis. Queerory inspires Cusset’s approach to “homo-reading” as described in a prefatory quotation from Felix Guattari: “In my opinion, it’s not worthwhile asking oneself about homosexual writers. But instead we are better off seeking what is homosexual in any great writer, even if he is a heterosexual.”

What has this to do with “queering” French lit on U. S. campuses? Cusset, a former director of the New York-based French Publishers’ Agency, shows only an occasional, rather dismissive interest in this subject. (“American homo-theoretical jargon is obsessed with the niceties of Marlowe’s rectal grammar and the urinary allegory in Lamartine’s work.”)

In The Inverted Gaze, Francois Cusset focuses on the venerable French gay literary triumvirate of Gide, Genet, and Proust, although there are extensive meditations on Rabelais, Baudelaire, and Flaubert (regarded as a “queer old uncle” solely because his youthful diaries record a diversion with a smallpox-scarred Arab lad in Cairo.) Cusset spends considerable time “queering” that stolid representative of the heterosexual bourgeois norm, Honore de Balzac.

The Inverted Gaze is heavily weighted with doses of French critical ideology, although there are many pleasures in this text for those who are not necessarily inspired by Foucault, Derrida, Barthes et al. Francois Cusset is an elegant, playful, occasionally outrageous writer whose prose abounds with observations that are often obscure but nevertheless interesting: “Homosexuality in Proust’s work is not a fact, an event, but a way of broadcasting, gradual and invasive.” “Exalted prose is always resonant, self-admiring intellectual blasphemy.”

Cusset apologizes for his “aphoristic style” although it fits well with his flare for boisterous intellectual tomfoolery. We are told of “. . . the unexploited potential of peda-gogy, of textual anal-ysis, of works of f®iction and the manipulation of short forms, Japanese and Elizabethan texticules.” Cusset quotes the curious 1749 pamphlet Several Simple Explanations for the Rise of Sodomy in England. Even Cusset’s chapter titles are rollicking good fun: The Liberties of Fuck All, The Bourgeoisie of the Inverted and, my favourite, whatever it means, Renaissance and (De)tumescence. »

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Monoceros

by Suzette Mayr
Coach House Books, 2011
268 pp.; $20.95



How do we talk about the now-familiar tragic event of the bullied gay teenager’s suicide? Every few months, a new face is held up by the media as the latest object of outrage, pity, and compassion. Columnists write eulogies and politicians speak of the need for acceptance and healing. In the past year, Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project has collected thousands of YouTube videos of Queer survivors, elders, celebrities and questioning youth, assembling an archive of despair and resistance. In her novel Monoceros, Suzette Mayr refuses the triumphant arc, the tidy narrative of sacrifice and redemption, and instead wades into the story of a single gay teenager’s suicide and the people who stagger through the aftermath — people who don’t have answers, who don’t necessarily believe in healing, and who are to varying degrees pathetic, broken, regretful and, above all, contradictory.

Mayr uses frequent changes in perspective and tone to create a fractal narrative structure — the pieces do not form a whole and do not settle. The dead boy, Patrick Furey, begins the novel with a despairing wail and then vanishes, his absence filling with the voices of his mother, his closeted boyfriend Ginger, Ginger’s possessive and gloriously petty girlfriend, his closeted Catholic Calgary (ouch) high school counselor, and others in Patrick’s complex community. Through their stories we see how Patrick was killed by partial silences and, crucially, by the conservative values accepted and enacted by the Queer adults in his world. Mayr’s stroke of brilliance in Monoceros is to juxtapose a long-term closeted relationship between Patrick’s school principal Max and school counselor Walter with Patrick and Ginger’s closeted relationship. Patrick’s despair is created not only by homophobic parents and his insular Catholic world, but by the self-hatred of those best equipped to help him. Mayr does not pander to notions of Patrick’s lost Queer utopian future, but takes on the daily compromises and small lies of his days.

Monoceros is also a very funny book. The teenagers are gleefully skewered, without the saccharine tone of Glee. In particular, the Mean Girl character of Ginger’s girlfriend is masterfully done. Yes, she led the homophobic charge on Patrick, because she loved Ginger and was threatened by his love for Patrick. Mayr manages to make her a sympathetic character, showing the insecurities underneath her craving for sexual dominance. She’s complicit in Patrick’s death, but is equally a confused, melodramatic kid who went too far. Mayr brings in the campier, playful side of Queer through a drag queen named Crepe Suzette to shake up Max’s world, a storyline which is sweet and awkward but doesn’t shed enough light to counterbalance the darkness of Patrick’s death.

Queer literature is full of black gems that focus on the language that can make beauty outpace suffering, if only in posthumous tribute —Jim Grimsley’s Dream Boy, Alan Barnett’s The Body And Its Dangers, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Mayr’s writing joins that slant, shadowed tradition. Think of Monoceros as an unsentimental response to It Gets Better, or as its chaotic twin—a story that has the courage to eschew optimism and capital H Hope for the jagged, uncompromising, and transformative. »

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Irma Voth

by Miriam Toews
Knopf, 2011; 255 pp., $29.95



Irma Voth is quintessential Miriam Toews. Written in the quirky yet melancholic voice that has become Toews’ hallmark, it is more accessible than her early hit, A Complicated Kindness, and more profound than her recent road novel, The Flying Troutmans. In it, Toews revisits with increased urgency her characteristic motifs of family crisis, repressive religion, and resilient youth, also exploring themes of translation, art, and agency.

Nineteen-year-old Irma Voth lives in a Mennonite “campo” near Chihuahua, Mexico. Raised in Canada until age thirteen and speaking Low German at home, Irma knows three languages but fully inhabits none. Whether due to isolation, trauma, and/or lack of education, she often cannot articulate herself beyond “I don’t know.” Yet her interior monologue, though sometimes naïve, is by turns fast-paced and meditative, occasionally even reminiscent of Lydia Davis: “On a clear day I can see the Sierra Madre mountains way off in the west, and sometimes I talk to them. I compliment them on their strength and solidity, and by hearing myself talk that way I am reminded that those words exist for a reason, that they’re applicable from time to time. It’s comforting.” Indeed, comfort is in short supply in Irma’s world.

Disowned by her father for marrying a Mexican and quickly abandoned by her young husband, Irma fends for herself, while loathe to move away from her mother and younger siblings, especially her twelve-year-old sister, Aggie. When Diego Nolasco, a Spanish-speaking filmmaker, arrives in the area with his crew, Irma translates—and often intentionally mistranslates—his directions to a German actress. A vehicle for Irma’s own self-expression, this creative mistranslation also transforms the movie’s female lead from a passive victim into a spirited rebel. Encouraged to keep “a diary of the ‘shoot,’” Irma takes notes that, we are led to believe, eventually develop into the novel itself.

Though structurally ragged in spots—the intermittent, present-tense diary entries feel somewhat contrived and paradoxically disrupt the immediacy of the central, past-tense narrative—the novel possesses an intensity rooted in frequent crises as well as poignant discoveries: for the first time, Irma wears a bathing suit and swims in the ocean; confides in a stranger and receives support; watches a film and sees her life reflected on screen. In its closing pages, the novel delivers a pair of wrenching revelations that both account for its pain-drenched tone and prompt Irma to confront her own deep-seated guilt.

“Art is a lie,” opines Irma’s father, a rage-filled patriarch deeply opposed to his daughters’ involvement in Nolasco’s film. But when the sisters eventually flee to Mexico City, Diego Rivera’s mural at the National Palace releases a tidal flood of emotion and recognition. As Irma explains, Rivera is “asking all Mexicans to look squarely at the history of their lives, at the beauty and the misery and the pain and the struggle and the wreckage.” Similarly balancing suffering with grace, Toews’ novel itself powerfully testifies to art’s capacity to express emotional truth. »

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Anticipated Results

by Dennis E. Bolen
Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011:
240 pp.; $18.95



Dennis E. Bolen’s latest collection of stories reads like a fractured novel where the reader is best served by reading the book from start to finish. A group of friends and acquaintances—best described as over-educated, under- or questionably-employed, and definitely too smart for their own good—reappear throughout the stories, becoming familiar through their myriad idiosyncracies which usually involve esoteric conversation and plenty of booze.

By no means gloomy or despairing, there is a sense of entropy here, of clocks ticking off the moments of a life, of chances blown, indeed an acknowledgement of lives that didn’t turn out quite as, um, anticipated. In a moment reminiscent of Joyce, Bolen’s first-person narrator speaks of the ubiquity of clocks in the urban surround: “There are clocks everywhere if you think about it. . . . Computer screens the world over scroll the clock. There’s the Gastown Steam Whistle shrilling it up every fifteen minutes. There’s the Noon Horn down at the harbour blaring the first four notes of ‘Oh Canada.’” But rather than symbolizing some modern background anxiety, time here seems to act more as a reminder: to get on with the business of living—and here the business of living is usually rendered in terms of cavorting and socializing, with alcohol and drugs always at the ready. Despite the overt boozing and the fact that most of the characters seem to express a sense of self-doubt over their life choices, or lack thereof, Anticipated Results really seems to be about the struggle to find happiness with the cards one has been dealt. In a way, everyone here’s a loser, but not really. The characters share a common thread of honesty. An awareness of responsibility for choices made, or not made, gives Anticipated Results a redemptive quality that overshadows its more nihilistic and fatalistic explorations.

The stories run the gamut from hilarious absurdities to brief slices of life that read more like descriptions of fleeting moments that vanish into the ether without explanation. Throughout it all it is the social bonds between the characters that carry the most narrative weight. Certainly the social bonds on display here are less than ideal, in some cases they’re downright dysfunctional, but Bolen seems to be suggesting that it is precisely in absurdity—entropy even—where all the fun takes place. Take for example “Detox” where the narrator describes an intervention that ends up in a bar with drinks lined up on the table and the subject of the intervention beaten to the point of hospitalization by those trying to help him. “An intervention? Fun?” says an incredulous narrator. But for us, it is fun, deliriously so. Or take “One of the Winters” when the narrator recalls a particularly combative final fling with a younger lover. “I turned back and caught a full picture of her just as she lunged at the door, her face a rage, her body hard and working. Feral. Timeless. A perfect human sculpture. I’ve got a feeling it might be the most profound moment of observation I ever have.” Throughout all the boozing and combat, however, there are glimpses into “normal” relationships. If anything, Anticipated Results revels in the basic human desire to connect with someone else—over a drink or six. »

» Commentary

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On Value

For those lucky enough to have survived it, the worst thing that happened in the 20th century was the malaise that defined it: the ubiquitous and relentless attempt of every political power to terminate public discourse, as reaffirmed by Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush at the Malta summit on December 3, 1989. Only weeks before, the world had witnessed the fall of the Berlin wall, as West and East Germans engaged in a spontaneous populist movement to tear down the symbolic barrier that had divided not only them, but also the rest of the world.

On that day, Gorbachev opined: “The world is leaving one epoch and entering another. We are at the beginning of a long road to a lasting, peaceful era. The threat of force, mistrust, psychological and ideological struggle should all be things of the past.” To which Bush added: “We can realize a lasting peace and transform the East-West relationship to one of enduring co-operation. That is the future that Chairman Gorbachev and I began right here in Malta.”

What is most remarkable about these pronouncements is their utopian vision of a world in which “enduring cooperation” between ideologies previously opposed for more than a century would define a perfect global future of classic Hegelian synthesis.

Of course, no sane person had ever wanted the Cold War to heat up into a nuclear holocaust, followed by a nuclear winter that would annihilate all life on earth. So Gorbachev’s veiled concession of defeat at that Summit: “I assured the President of the United States that I will never start a hot war against the USA,” was embraced by most with considerable relief.

President Bush had no need to claim victory on that occasion for the West—Francis Fukuyama had done that for him ten months earlier with an essay bearing the cautiously rhetorical title, “Have We Reached the End of History?” first written for and published by the American military-industrial think tank, the RAND Corporation. In fact, it is entirely within the realm of the conceivable that Fukuyama’s seminal essay provided both the vocabulary and the intellectual framework around which the outcome of the Malta Summit was constructed.

In his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama, newly confident and declarative, elaborated on his earlier tentative and equivocal 1989 essay: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

As if celebrating this alleged millennial victory of capitalist neo-liberalism a twenty-year orgy of “investment” swept the globe, as private, corporate and public entities all sought to secure and grow their share of Capital in this brave new world with what even the conservative monetarist Alan Greenspan would call during his address to the American Enterprise Institute on December 5, 1996, an “irrational exuberance.”

In the rarified diplomatic atmosphere in which the Malta Summit took place, the concluding public statements by the contending parties are never left to chance. It is worthwhile, therefore, to deconstruct exactly what Gorbachev was saying (to which Bush’s statement had merely been a rhetorical afterthought).

The fact that neither the public threat (nor use) of force, nor mistrust, nor psychological terror disappeared from the world after the Cold War (nowhere articulated more eloquently than in Derrida’s famous critique of Fukuyama’s thesis) is something to which we will return, but first let us take a closer look at the fourth alleged “threat” that Gorbachev had decreed should become a thing of the past: “ideological struggle.” Let us pause to look more closely at the political and ideological positions that had defined the dialectics of the Cold War.

On the political side, the combatants consisted of two ideologically opposed blocs of nation states: NATO in the West; and the Warsaw Pact in the East. Both sides had significant allies among nation states not signatories to these two specific treaty organizations—chief among them China for the East and Japan for the West. In the remainder of the world’s ideologically and more often than not economically “underdeveloped” nations, these two blocs competed for “spheres of influence” to which they exported their proxy war(s).

The two leading nation states of these blocs, the USA in the West and the USSR in the East, both represented themselves as democracies: both had allegedly been founded by populist revolutions against former monarchies, resulting in the execution and/or flight of the “loyalists” of their previous regimes; both were federations of more or less autonomous republics; and both guaranteed their citizens freedom. Where, then, lay the roots of their ideological struggle?
In their dialectically opposed definitions of freedom.

The nominally capitalist West tended to define freedom as the “positive, creative” freedom of their citizens to exploit; whereas the nominally communist East tended to define freedom as the “negative, reactionary” freedom of their citizens from exploitation. Each side accused the other, correctly, of governing under a one-party system whose periodic “elections” constituted a public fraud.

Insofar as philosophically neither of these dialectically opposed definitions of freedom are considered to produce a relatively greater public good than the other, it would appear that their simultaneous guarantee remains an equal responsibility for any system of authority that claims to govern with the consent of its citizens.

On this question, nothing in “Have We Reached the End of History?” is more telling than Fukuyama’s only instance of the use of emphasis in his essay: “The vast majority of the world’s nationalist movements do not have a political program beyond the negative desire of independence from some other group or people, and do not offer anything like a comprehensive agenda for socio-economic organization.” For Fukuyama, the Cold War could produce only winners and losers: “But the century that began full of self-confidence in the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to where it started: not to an ‘end of ideology’ or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.”

In this sentiment, Fukuyama revealed himself to be as deluded as his self-acknowledged mentor Hegel, who had previously announced the end of history on the occasion of Napoleon’s victory at the battle of Jena in 1806.

It appears to have seemed immaterial to Hegel that Napoleon, whom he claimed to have exported the civic values of the French Revolution to the world, had two years previously been declared Emperor of France, and commissioned a portrait of himself dressed in the full regalia of a Holy Roman Emperor—as immaterial as it must have seemed to Fukuyama that he published his seminal essay on the question of whether or not the world had reached the end of history in the late 20th century with the RAND Corporation.

But what was most significant about the ideological struggle of the Cold War is what its sound and fury had disguised: its subtext—the ideology of monetarism. Though colloquially considered a relatively recent neo-conservative discourse on how the control of the money supply influences the economy, monetarism is here used in its classical sense: a methodology of quantifying the value of assets by monetizing them—assigning a monetary value to them—a precondition for buying and selling them in the marketplace.

This larger dialectic that has persisted since the dawn of history is not the question of to whom the “surplus” Capital (or Equity) identified on the balance sheets of our financial statements as a Liability is owed; but rather how we constitute the value of the balance sheet’s other side: its Assets.



As Hegel had pointed out two centuries earlier, “Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.” The great tragedy of the 20th century was that capitalist and communist regimes of every political stripe and permutation—from imperialist monarchies to liberal democracies to fascist dictatorships to totalitarian socialists—had been arguing over which face of the same coin depicted its rightful owner: the individual symbolized by its head, or the community symbolized by the iconography on its tail. While both sides had been “right” insofar as the art of politics has always subsisted in the craft of balancing the interests of the individual with those of the community, what they had forgotten is that Capital is always identified as a Liability on the balance sheets of our financial statements—it is always owed—to someone or something, by someone or something.

Insofar as the ideological struggle of how, exactly, to define and distribute the value of both private and public Assets (and not just Liabilities) on our balance sheets equitably and justly remains unresolved in the public realm to this day, the answer to Fukuyama’s rhetorical question of 1989, “Have we reached the end of history?” will remain a simple and resounding “No.”

As Tony Judt points out in Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (2008), “Fear is reemerging as an active ingredient in political life in Western democracies… And perhaps above all, fear that it is not just we who can no longer shape our lives but that those in authority have lost control as well, to forces beyond their reach.” This observation will not be news to anyone who follows the popular media, the sole purpose of which often seems nothing other than to evoke the emotions of pity and fear—the old newsroom adage “if it bleeds it leads” has never been more true than in our age of terror. And more than any other human emotions, pity and fear isolate us from others, trap us within our private selves, focus all of our attention on the present, and relegate history to the realm of the immediately immaterial. We live, in the 21st century, in what Judt calls “an age of forgetting.”

If humanity is ever to achieve the catharsis of pity and fear that Aristotle claimed was the sole purpose of the public performance of tragedy, and which constitutes a necessary precondition for public discourse, we must remember and reengage what we have repressed—the lessons of history, particularly those of the age of conquest, the horrors and genocides of which the 20th century was the spectacular apotheosis.

But in the recollection and reappraisal of history necessary for us to imagine our future, we must avoid the virtualization of its lessons in the manner of that other current populist historian, Niall Ferguson. His The Pity of War (1998) indulges in the most extreme forms of “counterfactual history.” His The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (2008) conveniently glosses over the fact that the most profitable commodity traded by Europe’s earliest merchant city-states was neither silk nor spices, but “Slavs” (from which we derive our word slaves) . His Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011) attributes the “superiority” of the social economies of the West since the 16th century to the “purely coincidental” conjunction of six “killer apps”: competition; science; property rights; medicine; the consumer society; and the work ethic (the unfortunate, though profoundly telling irony of his use of this colloquial phrase in this context seems to have escaped the author), only half of which are, in fact, historically unique to Western Europeans. Together, these books amount to a sweeping apologia for the age of conquest, summarized as follows on page 314 of Civilization: “As we have seen, Western civilization did indeed destroy or subjugate most of the world’s civilizations after around 1500. Yet much of this was achieved with a minimum of outright conflict, at least compared with the number and scale of wars the Western powers fought with one another.” Clearly, Ferguson consulted neither with aboriginal people of the “New World” on this question, nor Adam Hochschild’s critically acclaimed King Leopold’s Ghost [1998] on colonial conditions in Africa. And it certainly comes as no surprise that Ferguson’s forthcoming book, Henry Kissinger: A Life [2012], is being touted as a “warts and all” biography of the supreme architect of the victory of the Cold War by the West.

What is perhaps most disturbing to those with an interest in “what history teaches” are the peerless intellectual credentials that both Francis Fukuyama and Niall Ferguson enjoy at what are considered the very best of the 21st century’s institutions of higher learning in English: Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; Ferguson is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, the William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, and a Senior Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

Anyone wishing to challenge the current received wisdom that we have indeed reached the threshold of humanity’s utopian millennial age in our century, and that living in our global village under a system of the one-party rule of capitalist neo-liberalism in which all ideological opposition has become by degrees privatized and thereby ultimately criminalized, governed by socio-economic “authorities” whose legitimacy is based on a virtualization of history and the relegation of memory to the immaterial, has before them a seemingly insurmountable ideological struggle—particularly in the face of Ferguson’s famous anti-intellectual, preemptive threat to his potential critics: “Nobody should ever imagine that they can do that kind of thing to me with impunity. Life is long, and revenge is a dish that tastes best cold. I’m very unforgiving.” (The Guardian—April 11, 2011)



Keeping permanent public accounts of who owes how much of what to whom seems to underlie the very invention and original purpose of writing. The earliest written form of Sumerian, for example, can be found on inscribed clay tablets representing commodities, and predates the use of cuneiform to construct narrative by at least 500 years.

Our current global methodology of keeping accounts is based on what is known as double-entry bookkeeping, a closed system, zero-sum method of recording the Assets and Liabilities (debits and credits) of a person, corporation, entity or government in such a way that they “balance.”

On November 10, 1494, right at the beginning of a period variously known as the “age of discovery / exploration / conquest,” Luca Pacioli published a book, Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalità, that contained a thorough description of double-entry bookkeeping, which had clearly been used in the Italian merchant and banking city-states centuries before his time. Written in the vernacular, Pacioli’s Summa quickly became a popular textbook for teaching mathematics.

By devoting an entire chapter of his Summa to this “Venetian method” of accounting, Pacioli elevated double-entry bookkeeping to the status of an objective science, fully comparable to his discussion of the principles of algebra in the same volume.

Interestingly, Pacioli also translated the Elements of Euclid [c. 300 BCE], not into the vernacular, but into Latin. While the 23 definitions, five axioms and five postulates on which Euclidean (or plane) geometry is based, particularly his Fifth Postulate concerning parallel lines, were still considered to be objectively unassailable in Pacioli’s time, they have been the subject of scientific debate since they were first claimed by Euclid to be self-evident truths over two millenia ago.

Then, around 1830, the Russian mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky described a mathematically consistent hyperbolic geometry by negating Euclid’s Fifth Postulate concerning parallel lines. At the same time, and working independently, the Hungarian mathematician János Bolyai, who had also postulated a hyperbolic geometry based on a constant negative curvature of space, demonstrated that any resolution of the debate as to whether the physical universe is most accurately rendered (described) by either Euclidean or hyperbolic geometry could not be proved by mathematics, but only by the physical sciences.

Shortly thereafter, the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann theorized the existence of an infinite series of geometries, the simplest of which was elliptic geometry, based on the postulate of a constant positive curvature of space.

By the end of the19th century, Madam Currie had done for physics and chemistry what Darwin had done for biology, and Riemann, Bolyai and Lobachevsky had done for geometry. It is no accident that the abolition of slavery in the Western world also occurred, by degrees, in the same century that witnessed a complete reappraisal of the fundamental axioms and postulates upon which all of Western science and civilization had been based since at least the 15th century, and most probably much earlier still—possibly, for some of its precepts, as far back as the 5th century.

It is reasonable, therefore, to ask why the fundamental axioms and postulates underlying the “science” of double-entry bookkeeping, (which is a more accurate analogue to geometry than it is to algebra), have not been subject to the same level of scrutiny since the 19th century as those which underlie all the other hard or objective or physical sciences of the West.

The answer, of course, is that there have remained too many vested socio-economic interests at stake that have prevented us—throughout a century that began with the technological slaughter of the war to end all wars; then indulged in a holocaust of multiple genocides; and finally presented us with dialectically opposed “scientifically demonstrable” threats of planetary extinction, first through a nuclear winter, then through a scorching summer of global warming—from shifting our ideological focus on only one subset of our balance sheets that has dominated not so much our age of forgetting as our age of denial—Das Kapital—to the fundamental axioms and postulates which underlie our methodology of accounting per se.

That reappraisal of our system of accounting for value and hence the wealth of nations, its potentially profound outcomes, and its historic necessity for the survival and sustainability of life on earth, will be the subject of Part Two of this article, scheduled to appear in the next issue of subTerrain.»



Part II of Karl Siegler’s essay On Value, “Our Unacknowledged One-Party Capitalist Oligarchy” appears in issue #63, on newsstands now.



NOTE:
_{The European slave trade and its seminal relation to the evolution of monetarism in the West is referenced by Pirene’s classic text, Economic & Social History of Europe, Routledge & Kegan Paul [1936]; elaborated upon in Robert Latouche’s The Birth of Western Economy, Methuen [1961]; and confirmed in Michael McCormick’s Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce AD 300-900, Cambridge [2001]—yet it is disingenuously denied in David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 years, Melville House [2011].}

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Waiting for the Catastrophe of My Life to Be Beautiful

“Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I got an unexpected text message from a friend one evening in early December. I was at my desk wondering how to massage a bunch of sentences and partial paragraphs into an essay—this essay—on happiness. I wanted to call it “Waiting for the Catastrophe of My Personality to Seem Beautiful Again,” an unoriginal title I pulled out of a poem I like, and I wanted it to be just as light and insightful as that poem. In it I planned to write about the happiest and saddest time in my life, which I imagined some people might like to read about.

It was two summers ago and I accidentally went into a coma while sitting in the kitchen of my East Van home on Father’s Day. I woke up the next month and found the tectonic plates of my world had collided. The tremors were the result of my own vanity and ego but because I wanted this piece to be more melodramatic than maudlin I planned to write about how all that damage and hurt had a good deal to do with the green-eyed acrimony and slanderous hysterics of a woman I called Voldemort.

I never wrote that essay. I might, but for now the prospect of writing about happiness when the narrative involves broken characters, the recalibration of emotional deposits across the quiet desperation of their lives, secretive intrigues and exposed anguish that closes relationships and starts new ones, the impotent ritual of goodbyes, and the malignancy of a casual encounter with mortality is just too bewildering. Like laughing when you’ve cut yourself badly or whistling in a graveyard at night. But then maybe, like Cormac McCarthy says in Blood Meridian, the high point of a guy’s life, the meridian, “is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.” Yes, it probably is.

So I was at my desk considering all this when my iPhone lit up. The message from asks, innocuously, “How are you?” I texted back that I’d been listening to black metal trying not lose my mind from all the term papers I’d been marking, and then I answered, “I’m all right. Hope you are too.” You know how sometimes you’re chattering inane pleasantries when the other person says something that makes you aware of just how inane those pleasantries are? Well, it was there, in that awareness and in the minute or two it took my correspondent to type the next installment of dialogue that our friendship happened.

“I’m a bit fucked up at the moment. How does one carry on with a life that appears to be so rich and so full at the same time as one’s interior being is in some sheer crisis about how to live rightly?” Maybe my iPhone didn’t really change everything, but that message, pitched at me with the sonorous elegance of a surprise question on a philosophy midterm you thought was going to be multiple choice, was lacerated with the metaphysical thrum of that proverbial voice of one who cries out from the wilderness.

Milan Kundera has this line in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a novel I’ve always thought is really a poem dressed up like an essay on human aesthetics, where he says that the brain has a special part that records all the things that charm us and make our lives beautiful. That message charmed its way straight into my “poetic memory.” I imagine most of these moments in our lives are attached to our lovers, the ones we tell our secrets to, or perhaps to our spouses or children or dogs; but here was my collegial friend, who probably hadn’t even been drinking at the time, asking me a question that was so fragile that it anchored itself into that part of my brain.

Text messaging isn’t the best way to address someone’s dark night of the soul. I index-fingered some clichéd lines—“Oh, sorry to…” and “I’m sure it’ll get…”—then back-spaced them out of existence. What does a tragicomic middle-aged guy who spends too much time in his office—and on that moderately alcohol-fueled evening trying not to despise himself too much while wondering why his own happiness and the happiness he was supposed to be writing about was so elusive—say when he gets such a bereaved question from somebody he’s always considered a consummate person—a writer, parent, partner, and teacher—who seems to have brilliantly spanned that existential cleavage between soul and self that infects his own and, I’m guessing, so many other lives.

When I’m confronted with the unhappiness that comes from the realization that the lives we live are malignant dramas of selective truths and lying poses we throw up to maintain the narratives and settings in which we’ve elected to act—whether they are my own or belong to others—I think of Kundera’s novel, which I’ve read often but finished only once because I dawdle and loiter in too many of his paragraphs. It’s therapy; it’s my happy-place. I used to think that it was the lyrical modulation of the words in the title—The Unbearable Lightness of Being—that was an all-purpose salve for the serene pain and absurdities of life. If I felt sad or melancholic or lonely I’d pull the title into my head where I imagined it could answer my really big questions with the seeming aplomb of God or Google, even if I didn’t know what those questions were.

Recently I’ve been taken, as if by some magnetic force of syntax that’s aligned itself with the turbulent narrative of my life—and, it seems, with the lives of so many other people—to one clause. It’s where Kundera’s staggeringly intellectual narrator, at the beginning of that beautiful love story between Teresa and Tomas, restates Nietzsche’s principle of eternal return, which is really the preoccupation of the entire novel: “happiness is the longing for repetition.” Like a fate tune that you think has been sung just for you, the clause has worked itself into my life—moving from the enchantment of youth to love and marriage and then to its poignant dissolution and now towards a degree of respectable survival—and I think, finally, I’ve come close to understanding what it means.

Happiness, if it exists as something more or less tangible, must be in the submicroscopic moments when we give our attention to a soul because that soul has sought us out. It could be the soul of a lover or child or parent or, in my case, a friend. There was a question and questions always demand answers but when answers are unavailable the only responsibility you have is to offer some response.

I considered replying to my friend’s “fucked up” question with the truth. I’m having a hell of a time cataloguing my own existential disintegration. I’m more than half way through my life and I have no idea what I’m doing. Or more simply, I messed things up pretty good when I was asking the same question, so I’m really not the one to ask. I considered reversing the onus and laying down some pathos. Hey, I had a vacation in unconsciousness where the angel of death had me by the ear and pulled me to the abyss and wouldn’t let me close my eyes until he was satisfied that I abandoned all hope. But that kind of narcissistic slush, no matter how truthful, would make me look like I wasn’t wearing my big-boy pants. Or too melancholic, and melancholy is too much like an emo-infused dominatrix who goes around pretending to be a doe-eyed Japanimated Lolita.

Last year a UBC study concluded that men who display too much happiness might, in fact, finish last. Rating the appeal of people “engaged in universal displays of happiness”—like smiling—that study, which was published in the American Psychological Association journal Emotion, questioned whether or not the presumed goodness of being friendly in social contexts is good in interpersonal communication. With guys, apparently, happiness isn’t. When I read it I felt vindicated in my own recalcitrant sadness, but that wasn’t going to be much help to my friend. Nor would it be helpful if I quoted another study I came across in my obsession with sorting out the impossibility of my own happiness—the Mappiness Project sponsored by the London School of Economics—that said, after sex and exercise, people are happiest when engaged in artistic pursuits like watching plays and going to museums.

Staring down the tiny blinking cursor in that empty bar above my miniature keypad I admit I was spellbound because I was taken into a confidence. There’s a line in an Al Purdy poem that is one of the most painful things I’ve ever read. It’s one of those pull quotes that you can apply in lots of situations, like duct tape for the poignancies of life. “I have seen myself fade from a woman’s eyes while I was standing there and the earth was aware of me no longer.” It’s a romantic context, and that doesn’t apply in this case, but the sentiment does: before typing in my response I felt like I had changed souls and the world was aware of me again.

Whether it is with a wife or lover or child, nothing is quite as agonizing as exposing your soul with all its strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vanities, and nothing is quite as joyful as someone who displays their soul for you.

But questions still warrant replies even if there are no legitimate answers. “If I knew what to say to you I’d a told myself the same thing last year and fixed myself. My answer? Spend time in the woods, be helpful to people, beer, listen to the Undertones.” That’s what I said in my response. It sounded a lot more heroic at the time.

I’ve since wondered if that crisis message—which I read while I was struggling with my own crisis—was an ironic synchronicity that the gods, with all their horoscopical retrogrades and mercurial transits, decided to toss at me for their amusement. I mean, is there a better way to remedy the spells of despair in your own life than hearing about a more articulate friend’s despair? It’s textbook schadenfreude, but if that person reaches out to you—to me?—in a moment of unvarnished sodality, then maybe it’s just an act of absolute goodness. It’s beauty, and happiness, something like the Buddhists mean when they talk about “loving kindness,” and it has everything to do with the slowness of conscientious communication with another person who has put you in a state of grace by confiding in you a wound in their life.

Because I’d been teetering on the brink of my own despair since I disappeared into a parenthesis for a few weeks of my life I’d done some anecdotal research into the state of my own happiness. To the point that it was, and probably still is, an absurd obsession. I got the “gottaFeeling” app, which I tell people I downloaded because I read about it The Financial Times and because its homepage features a quote from the philosopher Spinoza: “Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.”

To help me form a picture of my suffering, every day for half a year my iPhone’s been pinging me, usually in mid-afternoon, and asking “How do you feel?” The possibilities go from “Happy” to “Guilty/Sham.” That day in December I clicked the first and it asked “What level of Happy do you feel?” “Jovial”, I thought, but only because classes were done and I already had a couple of drinks. After I registered my feeling the screen said “You feel jovial”, which I already knew, and showed me a pleasant black and white cartoon sketch of a woman who looks like Olive Oil drinking a glass of wine and sitting on a chair in a field with nothing but a hill and some trees.

When I’m feeling “guilty”, the worst feeling you can have, and I register the level as “mortified” and the screen shows me a despondent woman, her back towards me and hands in her pockets—although she should probably have a drink in one of them—sulking away in the direction of her long shadow. I know this because I’ve seen that picture quite often, although I’m not sure how picturing this or any of the other feelings has eased my suffering.

The same day I got my friend’s text message I also did an online Chakra Test. I noticed it in the advertisement bar at the top of my Gmail inbox. I’m not exactly sure what kind of thing a chakra is, but my results sounded bad. All of them are “closed”, except for my heart chakra, which is “weak.” The “Chakra Healing Team” has been kind enough to send me at least one remedy a day since doing the test.

I’ve tried many things to eliminate the chasm that separates who I am from who I appear to be—to be happy—and alleviate the resulting sadness that comes from not being able, ultimately, to do it. Buddhism, yoga, herbs, sex, increasing my quotient of Facebook friends and “Liking” their stuff in the hopes that they’d like mine back, narcotics, psyllium, running longer, reading, drinking more, moving into an office with a better view, wearing clothes more suitable to a college English prof, bird watching, punishing myself with guilt for the hurt I have caused others, tending to plants, quality time with my daughter and dogs. I even tried therapy, but my employer covers only part of the cost and I can’t afford that kind of bling to give the inside of my head a makeover.

But in that momentary exchange with my friend, which I’m sure to anybody else was entirely unremarkable, there was a happiness. It happened between the expression of vulnerability that came in the form of a text message that evening in early December and a hesitant, inelegant response. That’s where happiness is. In the agonizing slowness that happens when you are considering another person’s wounds.

Andre Dubus, the writer of extraordinary mid-life-crisis and disintegrating relationship novellas, says in We Don’t Live Here Anymore that what kills a marriage faster than adultery is the selective dialoguing that comes with it. There are always things, in other words, that the two people can no longer talk about—love, desire, intimacy, passion—and that’s the problem: “you avoid touching wounds and therefore avoid touching the heart.” Many of us know this firsthand. And how can you be happy when you don’t touch hearts and, when necessary, wounds? »

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Better Than Evens

Knew that we ventured on such dangerous seas
That if we wrought out life ’twas ten to one
            —William Shakespeare, Henry IV

At the opening of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 tragicomedy, Waiting for Godot, we see two “tramps,” Estragon (Gogo) and Vladimir (Didi), waiting beside a dead tree on a desolate country road. They are waiting for a man to arrive, a man named Godot. They appear to have bet the farm on this chance meeting and are down to their last carrot and turnip, their clothes and shoes worn to tatters.

Our collective plight is not as dire as that of Gogo and Didi, but it could be. Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 dystopian novel, The Road, is a contemporary take on our world gone badly sour, with a definite twist: whereas Gogo and Didi are anxious for the man to arrive (he represents the prospect of “hope”) and wait day after day in the open (so’s not to be missed), and thus cannot “go on” lest Godot comes and they are not there, the Man and his boy in The Road, know better than to trust men and do everything they can to keep moving, to keep going on, to not be seen by other desperate travellers.

The main lesson here is that we don’t have to go down this particular road. We can choose to take action, (unlike Gogo and Didi who have surrendered their fate to chance, who wait—despairingly—to be saved by some mysterious white-haired guy who, not unlike the second coming of Christ, seems to continually postpone his arrival); we in the here and now can initiate change.

Yet here we are, and the debate about what we can do to save the planet—how to reverse the damage inflicted by industrial waste, carbon emissions, and global warming—rages on. As a species, we are infatuated with the idea of beating the odds against. Short-term gain nearly always outweighs any potentially destructive outcome of the gamble. Build a nuclear reactor here, drill for oil there. Estimated risk each year of an earthquake intense enough to cause core damage to the reactor at Three Mile Island is 1 in 25,000. Far better odds than the 1 in 14 million you have of winning the Lotto 6/49. (The government likes the odds!) So the calculable risk is worth it, no? Ask the people living near Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, the Fukushima plant in Sendai, Japan.

What are the chances of a rig toppling, or a mainline being ruptured, potentially spewing millions of barrels of crude into the surrounding ocean? We need oil, we need jobs, we need profit—let’s do it! Witness the Exxon Valdez Alaskan oil spill of 1989—considered to be one of the most devastating human-caused environmental disasters, resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands of water birds and other sea life—and last year’s Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. By the lax coverage in the mainstream media, you’d think that oil spills are an infrequent occurrence. We only hear about the record-setting ones, the ones not easily contained and covered up. A simple online search of “oil spills” reveals their all-too-frequent occurrence worldwide.

But maybe I’m just another naive alarmist. It’s a big world; it can take a lot of hammering. Perhaps we will act and save the planet and ourselves from imminent catastrophe. Or maybe we’ll forestall action, like Gogo and Didi, and continue to wait. Maybe Godot will come tomorrow and we’ll all be saved; if not tomorrow, perchance the day after. »

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That Sinking Feeling

Initially, it wasn’t our intention to marry the subject of the Winter Olympic Games to the idea of regret, but things being what they are in these irony deficient times, the two came together in a timely fashion and it now seems that they make ideal bedmates.

Last fall, as announcements were hitting the news that the BC arts community would likely suffer severe cuts to their provincial arts funding (as high as 80-90%), many thought that this hobbling of the arts had as much to do with the Olympics as it did with the sputtering world economy. Provincial funding cuts, and an almost total disappearing of Direct Access Gaming funds (revenues derived from gambling) for most arts organizations as well as many non-profits, appeared to be a fairly transparent cash-grab to bolster the government coffers. Hoover the chips and cash from the public felt and hope for the best. From my view across the water, it looked like the bean-counters in Victoria didn’t like how their budget forecasts were shaping up and panicked in an attempt to cover the anticipated shortfall in the provincial contribution to the Olympic balance sheet. A shortfall that threatened to be huge. For many of us that work in the arts sector, it was hard not to see the provincial government and the “arms-length” arts council as a Janus-faced adversary watching us recede into the past as the glitz and glam of the gleaming Games were racing towards them.

Vancouver’s Poet Laureate, Brad Cran, was invited to read a poem as part of the Winter Games, so long as the poem, he says, “corresponded to themes as provided to me by an Olympic bureaucrat.” He knew the poem he had written regarding the plight of the female ski jumpers wouldn’t fly, so he proposed a couple of suggestions as to how vanoc might incorporate poetry into the events. Both ideas were rejected; in response, he declined to participate. The community (and freedom of speech supporters everywhere) applauded his stand. The talented slam poet/spoken word artist, Shane Koyczan agreed to perform at the Opening Ceremonies and you have to wonder if, by his acceptance of the offer to read, he was just trying to avoid that horrible feeling—the hole in the stomach, the sinking feeling, the opportunity loss, the sense that one’s ship has sailed, the strange sense of wanting to rewrite the past—that we call “regret.” Or if he just couldn’t resist his chance to read his poem, “We Are More,” in the international limelight to a billion-plus listeners around the globe. Pretty cool for the world of poetry.

And as Chris Shaw says in “Sorting the Hype from Reality”: In a nutshell, the Olympic Games pose the interrelated questions: is it to be people before profit or the opposite, and will decisions be made by communities or by an elected—or worse—an unelected elite?

Those are really the only questions that need to be asked and the only questions that need to be answered.

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Mr. Pink Schools Us on Good Cover Design

You don’t work for a literary magazine for the money. You work for a literary magazine for the fringe benefits. And one of the advantages of working for a magazine like subTerrain is getting to attend a professional development symposium—you know, for free.

One of these conferences was held at a former drug and alcohol rehabilitation care facility overlooking Sidney B.C. that had been taken over by the University of Victoria and had been repurposed as a conference centre—apparently at a significant financial loss to that venerable institution. Hidden above Highway 17 between Victoria and Schwartz Bay—you had to drive up a switch-backed road through a dense second-growth forest—the centre was comfortable and tastefully decorated but couldn’t hide it’s original utilitarian underpinnings. I imagined the ghosts of the clientele from the 70s and 80s, wandering the halls late at night muttering to themselves, desperate for a line, or a drink, looking for someone, anyone, to talk to and share a smoke and convince the other to share a cab and get the fuck out of this place.

Anyhow, one of the sessions I attended was all about “proper” magazine cover design. The presenter was a man with a tendency to repeat how he was “an eternal optimist” and was “really bullish” about the Canadian magazine industry. Upon hearing these superficial epithets, seemingly directed at newbies to the industry, I knew I was in for a tedious lecture. This man, white—verging on pink—middle-aged, balding, proceeded to lead us through a Power Point presentation showing examples of what he thought to be good and bad magazine covers. I was dismayed to see that the covers he praised were overwhelmingly generic. You know the type: heads and sub-heads running down the right side of the cover superimposed on an object of consumer desire.

When it came to the part of the lecture given to describing bad cover design, in a room of my peers, my heart sank when a slide of subTerrain # 52, the “Forms” issue, came on screen. Given the presenter’s taste in magazine covers I probably shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was especially annoyed because this was an issue where I made a contribution to the cover design. I remember suggesting to editor-in-chief Brian Kaufman that it would be amusing to base the design on an actual government or bureaucratic document, or, you know, “form.” And that’s essentially what Derek von Essen, our regular designer, came up with. Apparently the guy didn’t get the joke.

My pride wounded, I probably sat there with arms folded rolling my eyes, thinking, “What do you know, Mr. Generic magazine guy? This is art we’re trying to create here, you dickhead.” A momentary silence fell over the room.

Then, a nice girl form the UBC Creative Writing MFA program sitting behind me leaned forward and said in my ear, “I kinda like it.” »

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Erasure and Exile

How are we to think about Vancouver, our young and beloved city beside the sea and under the mountains? Popular conceptions, government and advertising rhetoric, would have us believe that we are perfect, innocent, beautiful, without a past. Popular and not-so-popular fiction, on the other hand, gives us an account not so easily separated from past and present hard realities. For such a young city, Vancouver’s history is marred by monumental acts of racism, violence, and neglect. The mining of our bygone days reveals this without much effort. But now our non-fiction recitals offer us up as a commodity, a sacrifice to the inhumane machinations of the market, erased of a past both good and bad. How can we know ourselves in this arrangement?

Describing the hostility towards Canadians of Japanese descent and their eventual internment outside of the city and province in the early 1940s, the semi-autobiographical Obasan by Joy Kogawa presents an eerily familiar Vancouver cityscape, but one where the acts committed by the white majority ironically (or, perhaps, not ironically at all), echo the acts of Nazi Germany against European Jews:

Grandpa Nakane at Sick Bay? Where, I wonder, is that? And why is it the cause of distress? Is Sick Bay near English Bay or Horseshoe Bay? When we go to Stanley Park we sometimes drive by English Bay. Past English Bay are the other beaches, Second and Third Beach where I once went to buy potato chips and got lost…

Sick Bay, I learned eventually, was not a beach at all. And the place they called “the pool” was not a pool of water, but a prison at the exhibition grounds called Hastings Park in Vancouver. Men, women, and children outside Vancouver, from the “protected area”—a hundred-mile strip along the coast—were herded into the grounds and kept there like animals until they were shipped off to road-work camps and concentration camps in the Interior of the province.

The naming of popular geographical features of the city against the gathering inevitability of expulsion is a cruel irony. Places that are almost certainly associated with leisure and memories of happier times with family and friends become landmarks of a city that demanded a people’s exile. Besides the loss of property, homes, and businesses—which were never returned—less tangible things like memory and the sense of identity that comes with an attachment to a place, were stolen as well.

Throughout Obasan, silence, the inability, or more significantly, the refusal to speak of the past, is presented as forgetting, a willful amnesia—an unnamed presence, but one that is necessarily identified precisely because of its absence. Here, silence is a starving dark beast living in the hidden corners of the night. Naomi, the central narrative voice, describes her aunt’s domestic putterings:

She seems to have forgotten her reason for coming up here. I notice these days, from time to time, how the present disappears in her mind. The past hungers for her. Feasts on her. And when its feasting is complete? She will dance and dangle in the dark, like small insect bones, a fearful calligraphy—a dry reminder that once there was life flitting about in the weather.

She laughs a short dry sound like clearing her throat. “Everything is forgetfulness,” she says.

The subjects of forgetfulness are the victims of internment, but as Naomi’s other Obasan, the passionate and vociferous academic aunt Emily, points out, theirs is largely a psychologically internalized reaction imposed by a surrounding culture that demanded Japanese Canadians’ disappearance:

The Vancouver Daily Province reported, ‘Everything is being done to give the Japanese an opportunity to return to their homeland.’ Everything was done, Aunt Emily said, officially, unofficially, at all levels and the message to disappear worked its way deep into the Nisei [second generation Japanese-Canadians] heart and into the bone marrow.

The voice that Obasan gives to “the silence that will not speak,” demands acknowledgment of the past, not only from Naomi and her generation, but from the reader as well—perhaps a reader with only a cursory knowledge of his or her city’s history. Towards the end of Obasan, the reader is offered a catechism of sorts:

Where do any of us come from in this cold country? Oh Canada, whether it is admitted or not, we come from you we come from you…We come from the country that plucks its people out like weeds and flings them into the roadside… Where do we come from Obasan? We come from cemeteries full of skeletons with wild roses in their grinning teeth. We come from our untold tales that wait for their telling. We come from Canada, this land that is like every land, filled with the wise, the fearful, the compassionate, the corrupt.


Brett Josef Grubisic’s comparatively light-hearted, but ultimately tragic, novel The Life of Cities offers an account of Vancouver during the late 1950s that straddles antagonisms between personal freedom and oppressive social constraints—both self- and externally imposed. Early in the novel, central character Winston Wilson makes a literary identification:

Years ago, he’d read Alexander Pope’s couplet about mankind being born on an isthmus between two places—the feral and the angelic—and still felt it was apt. The two qualities were intertwined, fatally entranced by one another like Narcissus and his reflection.

Winston compares himself to Oedipus, the once king of Thebes: he lives with his mother, his father is gone, and one of his feet is damaged. Winston is aware of these similarities, amused even, as much as they relate to literary history—he is, after all, a librarian in the stuffy fictional Fraser Valley town where he lives. However, in relation to the underlying psychoanalytical bearing of the story of Oedipus, he is completely unaware—that is to say, he is unaware of himself, not as unconscious and metaphorical murderer and usurper, but as a closeted gay man. Winston, in his denial of who he is, however much he is unaware, has always been an outsider, has always been banished to the fringes. But by virtue of his outsider status he is neither comfortable in the straight-laced world of fictional River Bend City, nor does he shed his uptight nature when he discovers a gay subculture moving about the seedy bars and dark corners of Vancouver.



An excerpt from “Erasure and Exile: The theme of expulsion in contemporary fiction of the Terminal City” by Patrick Mackenzie.



From Issue #54/55. On newsstands any day now!

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Writing Groundwork

You might think a city as young as Vancouver, founded only in 1886, wouldn’t have a lot of literary history. But it’s been home and inspiration to many writers in many genres. Rather than trying to condense more than a century of literature into a short article, I’m focusing on the work of women poets in Vancouver. And it seems only fair to make it clear that I’m not deterred by the intrusion of an inlet or bridge. If a woman lived in North Van or even Richmond, I’m pretty sure her work was coloured by the experience that is Vancouver.

Among the city’s earliest celebrities was Pauline Johnson, the poet who’s buried in Stanley Park. Aside from that dubious claim to fame, she was certainly one of Canada’s first performance poets. Clothed in calfskin and other supposedly-traditional regalia, Johnson (billed as Tekahionwake) filled theatres across the country—a feat accomplished by not even a handful of poets today. Aside from the arena-filler, Leonard Cohen, the only candidate who might currently outdraw her would be Margaret Atwood.

The best known of Johnson’s books is Legends of Vancouver, a collection she apparently wanted to call Legends of the Capilanos. Popular though she may have been, marketers had their way. After all, she was only a woman.

But Johnson played other roles besides that of Mohawk Princess. For the first half of performances, she’d wear the genteel fashions required by ladies of the day. Dressed in such finery, she’d have fit right into the newly-founded (in 1916) Vancouver Poetry Society, or VPS, as it was known. Comprised mainly of men, its goals were lofty and included the still ambitious-sounding objective, “The development of public interest in the work of contemporary poets.”¹ Among early members of the VPS was Florence Randal Livesay, mother of Dorothy Livesay. Livesay, of course, is namesake of the annual prize given for British Columbia’s best book of poetry.

Livesay’s first book, a sixteen-page chapbook, Green Pitcher, was published in 1928. It consisted of short lyric poems, and may well have been printed at the behest of the poet’s mother, who knew the publisher. Later in life, Livesay remarked, “Without my parents being in it at all I most likely never would have published. Later I grew to resent it and felt embarrassed—most people don’t have that kind of start.”² When Dorothy went off to study at the Sorbonne, she seems at first to have put poetry aside. But while in Europe, she began reading men who were writing about social causes, and when she came home, she moved in that direction too.

Just as the 1960s were a time of protest that resulted in huge shifts in societal attitudes and behaviours, so too were the thirties. As is so often the case, times that are tough seem to prompt art that challenges the wrongs of the day. With thousands unemployed, Livesay (by then a social worker) began writing about the wrongs she witnessed, “…breadlines, riots, police brutality and the mass movements of the unemployed…”³ This presented a substantial shift—not only for her, but for much poetry writing in general, especially for those still considered the “fairer sex,” a term that to me has always suggested the weaker-of-mind sex. Her long poem, “Day and Night” (first published in 1936) “…was the first poem by a Canadian unashamedly to preach social revolution.”⁴ It is about this time that Livesay came to British Columbia. She lived for a while in Vancouver, and then for many years in North Van.

By the 1940s, Livesay was certainly not the only woman writing about subjects that mattered. But she remained the one getting the most recognition, winning two Governor General’s Awards during that decade.

Yet Livesay was doing more than writing poetry. She was one of the co-founders (with several others, including Anne Marriott) of Contemporary Verse, a poetry magazine that was the precursor to today’s CV2. Despite involvement in such collegial projects as starting up a magazine, Livesay was known for not always getting along with others. She had ongoing feuds with a number of writers, and occasionally wrote unflatteringly about those she disagreed with. In my own experience, though she could be very good at playing the role of crinkly-eyed grandmother, it was a rare visit when she didn’t manage to instigate an argument between my then-spouse and me. I still believe that this was purposeful, and that she found a kind of glee in stirring the pot of discord.

All said, although she may be the best-known of the women poets who spent part of their lives in Vancouver, she is not necessarily the most important.

As far as my own writing goes, a much more influential writer is Anne Marriott, who lived in various places around the province, but spent a number of years in North Vancouver. Like Livesay, she was also inspired to write about the hardships of the thirties and is best known for her 1939 documentary poem, The Wind Our Enemy, an account of the dustbowl era on the prairies.

But it was another of Marriott’s poems that was a turning point for me. The piece affected me greatly—and made me realize that my own limited world experience as a single parent was one that might be worthy of poems. It was Marriott’s poem, “Battered,” that led me back to writing. Its simplicity and brutal truths reminded me that I could write about day-to-day realities, especially ones that weren’t attractive. Here’s an excerpt from its midsection:



…They loosen her fingers so gently one by one
the smallest still
in its tiny cast
from that earlier strange fall
pointing at dead ends
all around the room.



Parents
cry darling to the blotched face
through their bent lips
the blue bland surface of their eyes
drawn tight tight tighter
scarcely holding until they reach
the ’67 Chev
where all the poison in their heads
can split the iris
spurt out stab
with hate hate hate
each other
each other’s child
most of all that wretched child
each of them was.⁵



Kapow! When I first discovered it, “Battered” seemed like the most honest poem I’d ever read.

It wasn’t long afterwards that the work of Pat Lowther came to my attention. Like Marriott, she too wrote about the mundane realities of everyday life in a way that was anything but mundane. Yes, she was hugely influenced by Pablo Neruda, and some of her strongest work reflects that, but of more importance to me was the fact that she was another of those poets who showed me it was okay to write about ordinary things—the paraphernalia and people who were part of my daily life as a woman—babies, kitchen utensils, the mixed pleasures to be found in observing the slow lives of slugs.

Lowther, maybe more than anyone, must be considered a Vancouver poet. I still can’t drive past Fraser Street without thinking of her, can still hear the sound of her voice, calling from the pay phone up the street from her house. These lines from her poem “Intersection” serve as a word-painting specific to a Vancouver I know:



…The Blue Boy Motor Hotel
advertises:
try our comfortably
refurbished rooms
with colour TV



…the bus stop bench
is painted blue, it
advertises Sunbeam bread



…you could walk into
that phone booth
and step out between the planets



An excerpt from “Writing Groundwork” by Heidi Greco
From Issue #54/55. On newsstands any day now!

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My Agreeable Illusion

When I was house hunting in Vancouver a few years ago I had one spectacularly ridiculous condition. If I was going to buy a 33’ x 122’ footprint the deciding factor was going to be, obviously, “location, location, location,” but location didn’t mean proximity to a school or Starbucks, nor did it mean neighbourhood demographics, alleyway traffic or oil tanks hidden deep in the back yard.

My condition was that I wanted to live within the panoramic view Ethel Wilson described in the first paragraph of her classic 1954 novel, Swamp Angel. And I was more or less serious, too.

I remember being met by an affably patronising smile in the rear-view mirror when I asked the realtor, who was driving us east along Dundas through Vancouver Heights to the next house, if she knew whether it was close to where Wilson’s novel opens. It’s not the kind of question you should ask a highly-caffeinated Vancouver real-estate agent. She knew Capitol Hill was east of the Heights but she hadn’t heard of Wilson. I didn’t bother telling her that I really did want to find a place that was inside the visual prospect a writer she hadn’t heard of described in a book, or that it was the most evocative—and perfect—opening in any BC novel I’d ever read.

It’s late afternoon and Maggie Vardoe, Wilson’s unsatisfied housewife protagonist, is about to walk out her back door, up the alley and into a waiting cab that will drive her away from a sterile marriage and towards a new life as a cook at an Interior fishing lodge. She’s standing alone at the living room window in her Capitol Hill home, doing what many people with pleasant views probably do when they’re standing alone at a window and not talking on the phone: she looks out, surveys the panorama, and thinks.

Ten twenty fifty brown birds flew past the window and then a few stragglers, out of sight. A fringe of Mrs. Vardoe’s mind flew after them … and then was drawn back into the close fabric of her preoccupations. She looked out … over the roofs of these houses to Burrard Inlet far below, to the dark green promontory of Stanley Park, to the elegant curve of the Lions Gate Bridge which springs from the Park to the northern shore which is the base of the mountains; and to the mountains.

Maggie, an outwardly uncomplicated Burnaby wife, just stands there and looks, but she’s canvassing the scenery like an artist would first survey a landscape. Then she has one of those moments when the ordinary objects we see in familiar environments appear ever so slightly unfamiliar and induce unordinary perceptions:
The mountains seemed, in this light, to rear themselves straight up from the shores of Burrard Inlet until they formed an escarpment along the whole length of the northern sky. The escarpment looked solid at times, but certain lights disclosed slope behind slope, hill beyond hill, giving an impression of the mountains which was fluid, not solid.

I can’t help but think that the annual fiction prize in BC is named after Wilson because of stylistically crisp and lucid sentences like these. Her writing, vivid and unpretentious as it always is, has this graceful quality of marvel and surprise embedded in the surface of simple descriptions.

It’s also the kind of writing that made me think, yeah, it would be kind of neat if my future mortgage payments could be directed to a part of the city a fictional character was looking at. I liked how Maggie surveyed the panorama, moving her eyes along the topography from one point to the next and then hitting that wall of mountain but not quite stopping there. This way of looking at the city always seemed archetypal to me. Like an Impressionist painter who knows that objects in a landscape can’t be represented accurately without considering the play of light and atmospheric conditions that enable us to see those objects in the first place, Maggie is looking at her environment with distinctly Van-couver eyes.

Looking out windows, whether in a novel or in a living room, is quite a normal activity in a visually stunning city that has a cultural fetish for voyeurism. Where else in the world does the real-estate industry, just like local literature and art, dwell on the value—both real and imagined—of points of view?

There are extraordinary views in Vancouver—most of them natural, some built, many hybrids—and we do like to look. We have what Lance Berelowitz, urban planner and author of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games Bid Book, calls a “cult of view.” Think of the official “view cones” city hall enshrined with their “view protection measures” to defend “view corridors” of the skyline, the North Shore and the surrounding waters from vertically-obsessed developers. Or the inspired images and text city officials issue—“Vancouver’s ‘greenness’ is overarching. It is a key to our collective identity. Vancouver citizens live in a green paradise,” reads Vancouver’s Green Capital brand promotion—to inculcate a sublime sense of civic optics.

I certainly bought into the cult of the Vancouver trompe-l’œil—metaphorically but also financially—even though only three of the city’s twenty-seven designated “view cones” are in East Van—Main Street, Commercial Drive, Trout Lake—and none of them protect what I see when I look up from this screen and out the window of my Hastings Sunrise home and survey pretty much the same panorama Maggie does in Wilson’s novel.

In no other city does the literature, even the creative literature produced by civic officials and realtors, fixate on the natural and urban geography as in Vancouver. Pauline Johnson’s mythical Lion’s Peaks, Douglas Coupland’s City of Glass, Zsuzsi Gartner’s perpetually beckoning City of Land and Sea, Malcolm Lowry’s contemptuous mountains gazing down on infernal Hastings Street, SKY Lee’s historically pungent Chinatown.

And Wilson’s Capitol Hill, which I think is the most ample point of view from which to look at Vancouver precisely because it is not one of the more clichéd vantage points—southern, northern, western—from which the city tends to be depicted. Close enough to downtown but a bit of an innocuous and remote asymmetrical mound of sandstone in North Burnaby, Capitol Hill is bisected with working and middle class residential streets, enclosed at its base by East Hastings, a city park and a sprawling refinery. It’s entirely average, except for its comprehensive view.

In Wilson’s short story “A Drink with Adolphus,” Mrs. Gormley tells her daughter that she needs to get to Capitol Hill by taxi to visit her friend. “To see the view. The house is old but he’s mad about the view on Capitol Hill.” And in “The Window,” a character, Mr. Willy, has a window on the northwest wall of his home that looks out over the water and mountains, just like Maggie does in Swamp Angel. The view is nice, but Wilson says the mountains are “deceptive in their innocency, full of crags and crevasses and arêtes and dangers.”

In literature as in life things are never exactly what they appear to be. I’ve looked out my window thousands of times since I moved into Wilson’s literary panorama. It never really changes—in shape and the throb of its volume—but like an optical illusion where a static object looks to be in motion the scene always is different, and I’m not just talking about the giant wind turbine that somebody stuck up on Grouse Mountain.

I imagine that when creative types look at a landscape they see those shifts all the time. BC’s beloved Emily Carr, who spent an awful lot of time staring at trees and mountains and then painting them, said that when she looked she saw “there was a coming and going among trees, that there was sunlight in shadows.” As for Wilson, she was a painterly writer with a talent for wrapping her words around the rippling facade in scenery. In a talk she once gave to the BC Society of Artists, she mentioned taking lessons from Carr at her Granville Street studio early in the last century.

Reality, whether it’s in a novel or framed by your window, involves empirical objects like trees and mountains but these objects in their composition often express something ethereal, like those vibrations and mysterious undercurrents pulsating just beneath the surface. What Maggie sees is a defamiliarised inventory of Vancouver landmarks that are familiar to anybody who lives here.

The crows that gather every late afternoon and commute in those swirly, undulating diagonal sky paths from across the Lower Mainland to roost in that unlikely forest by Willingdon Avenue. The massive thumbprint of Stanley Park. The harbour. Lions Gate and the ubiquitous North Shore where those mountains really do look like a flat green-black stage background until your eyes register colour and depth. Consider the variations in that light and its textured effect on the landscape, and then slowly notice the range of gradations and the separate hills that give the backdrop depth and dimension and make it look “fluid.”

Maggie isn’t looking at a static high-res image. The focal point that dominates the panorama—the punctum that “pierces the viewer” like the French theorist Roland Barthes calls it—is not one object in the inert landscape but the light and its fluid effect on the land. Like any Vancouverite who looks north, her eyes just stop at that 100-million-year-old granite and metamorphic rock of the Coastal Mountains, which at first look like a wall with height and width but then take on a third dimension, with a background that recedes farther and farther back. That optical phenomenon is probably the closest thing Vancouver has to an official way of seeing, which has less to do with passively apprehending the reality we see “out there” and more to do with our desire to give that reality a sense of meaning, structure and purpose by styling it as a fictional entity. »

An excerpt from “My Agreeable Illusion,” Issue #54/55 (Winter 2009)
Illustration: “Capitol Hill” by Laura Zerebeski

SubTerrain » sandbox

Beat Me: My Search for the Spirituality of Self-Harm

Does the use of pain reflect a love of endorphins, a deeper experience, or a psychological imbalance?

I’m a babbling, weeping emotional wreck. My ass is as black as an overripe plum and hard as a pit from all the accumulated swelling in the tissues. I can’t sit and can barely wipe after going to the bathroom.

“I think this stuff hits you heavier than other people,” my boyfriend says, two days after my public flogging at a local BDSM event. “I mean,” he continues, “if it was normal to have this kind of bad reaction, why would people do it?”

We’re arguing about whether BDSM is right for us. Sure, I’m a wreck. This shit hurts. But the physical damage isn’t what’s in contention: it’s my mental state. He thinks my wanting to be beaten is the physical manifestation of me wanting to be “hard on myself.” I want to challenge him. Why not legitimize my propensity for pain in a community of established practitioners, even though part of me wonders if it is only part of a pattern in a history of self-destructive behaviour that included drug use and abuse.

But I dismiss him, instead. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You haven’t been to that place.” It’s important that I feel tougher than him.

I’m drawn to those for whom BDSM is not only a way to fulfill sexual fantasies, but also a spiritual path. The experience of pain, submission and dominance can put people into a deep, trance-like state. It can, I think, be spiritually therapeutic.

Spirituality within BDSM is not a modern practice. Throughout history, many cultures and races have used forms of sadomasochism to gain insight into a higher state of consciousness: religious worshippers flog or crucify themselves, sleep on spikes, hang suspended by their flesh, or walk miles through scorching deserts with bare and bloodied feet.

I’ve been known to seek out similar experiences, although it has more to do with control than anything else. Masochists like me are characterised by our controlling natures. We control our relationships and gain what we seek from our pain giver. Modern medical research shows us that masochistic practices cause some big changes in human physiology, namely in levels of hormones, in brain waves, in attention and consciousness. For centuries mystics have used physical and sexual stress to boost endorphins and engender visionary experience. In some cases, a mystic’s ability to endure pain while in trance serves as proof of his or her spirituality.

 

The night I was flogged, women walked around the club with their breasts exposed, nipples bound with string, and men walked with their cocks in leather swinging back and forth. I wore a Chinese red silk dress. I didn’t want the fabric damaged, so I asked my boyfriend if he wouldn’t mind me taking my clothes off. I undid the snaps that ran from my neck down to my chest and then opened the zipper at the side. He pulled the fabric from my body, peeling me. Standing there in my bra and corset and girdle I felt tight: tight in my body, restrained and safe.

Lights illuminated the stage. People milled in line. When my turn came I climbed the steps toward a large man with a handlebar moustache. He wore no shirt and had a beer belly over his blue jeans. I was told later that, besides being a flogger, he runs a workshop where he teaches people how to do take-downs, kidnap someone from a public place—with their permission, of course—throw them into a van, hold them hostage, and even how to coordinate the personnel necessary to orchestrate such an act.

I told him that, except at home, with household objects like leather belts and wooden kitchen utensils, I had never really done this kind of thing before. “I … I like it kind of hard,” I said, reddening without knowing why, and then told him about my boyfriend’s thick leather belt, including where on my ass and thighs I liked him to hit me.

The journey he took me on challenges simple expression. A sense, like low music in the orchestra pit; it swells like sound and grows bigger. It crescendos and crashes and crescendos again into something bigger. Waves and waves, like being lost, like being out of time, like being struck by the high notes of flutes and then by the deeper reverberation of an oboe.

 

As young child, a girlfriend of mine read about a nun who had made a sacred vow never to allow her body to rest against the back of a chair. In pious imitation my friend followed her example and spent years sitting crookedly. Ascetics who subscribe to the psychology of self-inflicted pain value the suffering they wreak on themselves. Georgetown University professor Ariel Glucklich has explored the terrain of meaningful spiritual suffering in Sacred Pain. He examines the ways in which pain has been used to heal the human spirit: as a punishment for sin, a cure for disease, a weapon against the body and its desires, and a means by which the ego may be transcended.

The piercings performed during the Plains Indians’ Sundance is one of the better known and documented examples of religious masochism. Others include the practices of fire-walking Hindu yogis, Christian flagellants, Muslim Shi’ite self-injury, and body scarification among African tribal religions. There is also Buddhist lore on Zen students achieving enlightenment after being injured by their masters. All of them value pain as important to religious experience.

The fifth century Arab Christian saint Simeon the Stylite is said to have tortured himself to death for love of pain. He subjected his body to ever-increasing austerities from an early age, and on one occasion was discovered unconscious, his waist bound so tightly with a girdle made of palm fronds that days of soaking were required to remove the fibres from the wound.

He later took to standing continually upright as long as his limbs would sustain him, a practice still employed by some sadhus—Hindu ascetics—in India who stand 24 hours a day and sleep with their heads resting on a vertical pole. In order to get away from all the people who came to him for prayers, Simeon found a pillar amongst some ruins and formed a small platform at the top. In 1776, Edward Gibbon in History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire describes Simeon asceticism this way:

He sometimes prayed in an erect attitude, with his outstretched arms in the figure of a cross, but his most familiar practice was that of bending his meagre skeleton from the forehead to the feet; and a curious spectator, after numbering twelve hundred and forty- four repetitions, at length desisted from the endless account. The progress of an ulcer in his thigh might shorten, but it could not disturb, this celestial life; and the patient Hermit expired, without descending from his column.

I imagine that it must have been a sensation like sunshine, like summer in your skin, long and lazy as a brushstroke.

 

The man who flogs me on stage stops. Gently touches my shoulder blade with his finger.

“Can you feel that?” he asks, whispering in my ear.

“Yes.”

Satisfied I‘m not on the verge of passing out, he continues to whip me.

Later my girlfriend told me that she approached the stage and watched me closely. She said I hadn’t even flinched.

I experience flogging—either from a professional or by my boyfriend’s belt—as sensation, not pain. I open my mind and tear down all its fixed ideas. It’s about liberation: not words, not notions, just the sensation of leather on flesh.

When it was over, I put my arm around the flogger’s neck and said, “You’re really good.” I walked off the stage. I had snapped back into myself.

 

Another value in pain is relief of guilt, or pre-emptive payment for sins done wrong. Some psychoanalysts, including Freud, share a similar perspective towards self-harm. This is often the primary motive of Christian saints and martyrs.

So punishing the physical body is a way a person can “pay” for sins committed in life, serving to both relieve guilt and anxiety towards the justice they believe they will encounter after death. To believers, this has an obvious psychological benefit.

The real danger is that some people who practice self-harm have misplaced anger and pain that they are trying to resolve in destructive ways. Instead of confronting their emotional pain they bring themselves physical pain as a relief from stress. The relief is usually short-lived and the need for self-destruction quickly returns.

Sometimes I see my own indulgences as surrender, but I can’t say how much of my judgment is influenced by a stereotypical world view that wants me to label BDSM if not depraved then at least abnormal. Some people pour themselves a gin and tonic when they’ve had a rough day at work. Some light a joint, some visit the spa. I like pain.

As a kid, I’d pinch my skin or punch myself in the head; I’d carve my arms with a math compass and feel calm at the sight of the pomegranate seed drops of my blood. I’d starve myself and say “I’m strong” or “I’m bad.” Looking back, I realize it was slightly pathological.

Denying yourself ice cream when you’re ten probably has little spiritual value -- nor is carving bad tattoos into your skin redemptive, especially if they look like Tasmanian Devils.

 

Carl Jung differentiates between these pathological neuroses and positive forms of self-sacrifice. In Sacred Pain an affirmative surrender of the ego is illustrated through the case of a Lakota man suffering from a number of problems, including depression. After his experience with chest piercings at a Sundance ceremony the man said, “I felt pain, but I also felt that closeness with the Creator.” It’s not just the sensation of being flogged I find erotic; rather, it’s the state of mind it evokes: subdued, vulnerable, and ready to be taken advantage of. I tell myself it's not because I'm a neurotic that I want to be beaten, or because I have low self-esteem and think I deserve it, but because I aspire to a higher plane of consciousness. A type of spiritual catharsis, even truer for me in the etymological sense of the word—the relief of anxiety by bringing repressed feelings to consciousness.

A saying in the BDSM community is that “we have issues in our tissues.” For better or for worse, the release of these issues is something I haven't been able to accomplish through any means but pain.

Psychology Professor Roy Baumeister notes that people sometimes confuse the fact that they feel good after BDSM with the idea that BDSM is therapeutic. "To prove that something is therapeutic,” he says, “you have to prove that it has lasting beneficial effects on mental health... it's hard to prove even that therapy is therapeutic." In mental health terms, BDSM doesn't make you better and it doesn't make you worse.

In the 1980s, the American Psychiatric Association removed BDSM as a category in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and though it’s no longer technically a “pathology” I do have to wonder if my own penchant for self-harm is simply destructive.

 

My boyfriend handed me my clothes when I walked off the stage. “You wanna go have a smoke?” I asked.

We went out onto the stairwell. My legs were stiff and my ass excruciatingly numb. The night air was cool on my shoulders. Cool, then cold. I started to shake. Then, midway through a sentence, I began to see stars; a blanket of grey sparkles descended on me. I sat on my numb ass and the cigarette tumbled from my fingers.

I’d never fainted before in my life.

Suddenly, life feels sped-up, flash-frame, and each scene unnaturally precious.

My boyfriend found me a corner inside, in an unoccupied stairwell, concealed by a curtain. It was somewhere to hide. I ripped off my corset, angrily tore off my shoes. Now any restraint on my body—anything against my flesh—felt like an assault.

“Stay with me,” I told him. “Don’t leave me.”

He held my hand and didn’t let go.

 

Now, two days later, as we argue in the kitchen, I explain, “You don’t understand what those endorphins do to you when they’re released. You have no idea the high.”

I realize as the words come out of my mouth that I’m being dismissive. What I’m really trying to tell him is I don’t think you’ve got what it takes. You aren’t tough enough to feel so good. Why? Because I feel belittled by his assessment that the pain hits me “heavier” that it does others. I feel like someone who’s been told she can’t handle her liquor. A sissy, a cry-baby. Worst of all, part of me thinks he’s right. Maybe—like alcohol for the alcoholic—some people just shouldn’t indulge in BDSM.

 

When I worked the streets I was attacked by a stranger. I imagine I felt fear when he covered my mouth with his fist. The texture of his fingers, the way my lips were forced open, I could taste him. What? Why didn’t I bite down? Why didn’t I crush my cigarette in his face? I watched the spire of smoke, a useless red ember glowing from the corner of my eye. I use the word “imagine” because I can’t quite remember. Only the details.

Is my fear of him being released only now, latently, when I experience pain in a comfortable, nurturing setting?

Thus in the sixth century Saint Radegund practised self-injurious behaviour as a way of controlling terrible childhood memories of her family's murder. Although many saints like her would today receive a diagnosis of schizophrenia or hysteria, many of them did use masochism as an effective technology against painful pasts.

Part of me feels guilty after flogging my tension into submission, like that drinker again who wonders, maybe, deep down, if she isn’t making her problems worse.

I think this is what my boyfriend is trying to point out, which is why I’m so defensive. Despite the research indicating that BDSM does no real harm, Freud's successors continue to speak of it in the language of mental illness. Sheldon Bach, for example, a supervising analyst at the New York Freudian Society, argues that some people are BDSM addicts. They feel compelled to be "anally abused or crawl on their knees and lick a boot or a penis or who knows what else. The problem," he says, "is that they can't love. They are searching for love, and BDSM is the only way they can try to find it." Love.

I know that pain is a broad category and that within religious ritual it is a taboo subject. Despite this, rituals involving pain are universal. And yes, I wonder if both spirituality and masochism can’t be understood as flights from the self in search of love.

 

My daughters glimpse my bruises by accident. I explain they came from a tumble down the stairs wearing high-heeled shoes: I turn it into a cautionary tale to be heeded when they are playing dress-up at home. Three weeks later and my ass still hurts but the deep violet stains have faded away and what’s left has drained from my rear and sort of pooled in my thighs like stocking seams. But the pain is still there, deep in my tissue, buried, like something almost invisible from the outside. »

SubTerrain » sandbox

The Harper Conservatives and Their Dirty Oil Pipeline

“Northern Gateway” – a gateway to what?

There is always a balance to be struck between driving “development” and protecting the “environment.” Despite the present government’s claim that their new legislation will provide both increased development and protection of the environment, it is obvious that their legislative initiatives are moving Canada toward more development and less environmental regulation & assessment. Whether that is good or not is a political question, of course, but here are some of the particulars.

The Harper Conservative majority government has “streamlined” the environmental assessment process to speed up development, by removing 3,000 projects from review by the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA). Of course, nationwide, the big one that is still in there is the Enbridge “Northern Gateway” pipeline to carry tar sands crude from Alberta to Kitimat, BC, which this Alberta-based government wants very badly.

What is at stake environmentally is discussed in an Oct 7th Toronto Star article titled ‘Why Northern Gateway shouldn’t go near Great Bear Rainforest,’ by John Honderich, Chair of the Toronto Star‘s Board of Directors. It points out that recent legislation weakening the federal government’s obligation to do environmental protection is more than anything else aimed at preventing environmentalists, native groups, and the BC provincial government from blocking or delaying the construction of this pipeline which is intended to carry dirty tar sands oil from Alberta to Kitimat, BC to go onto oil tankers bound for the Asian market. The article notes that “the fierce opposition of the Coastal First Nations to the project is well known” and their rights to the land have never been ceded. The tankers departing from Kitimat would pass through dangerous waters: first the 2-3 km wide 70 km long Douglas Channel and then around 27 km long Gil Island with the channel narrowing by half. It was at the northern tip of Gil Island where in 2006 the BC Ferry Queen of the North missed a turn, ran onto the rocks, and sank. It is true that cargo vessels, e.g. ore carriers, have been carrying commercial cargo along this route for decades, but modern supertankers have never done so, and they are six to seven times as long as a typical ore carrier and need at least half a kilometre to alter course. Furthermore, a load of bauxite sinking to the bottom of the channel is much less of an environmental threat than “a supertanker disgorging millions of litres of molasses-like bitumen.” This area is the world’s second largest temperate rainforest, called the Great Bear Rainforest because of the spectacular population of black, grizzly, and kermode bears that live off the abundant salmon runs. By comparison, tankers loading at Valdez, Alaska and going out through Prince William Sound have it easy and safe: the exit from Valdez Arm and past Bligh Reef (where the Exxon Valdez went aground) into open Prince William Sound is about 30 km, and the tankers are always escorted by tugs. Two tugs escort each laden tanker through Prince William Sound and remain at Hinchinbrook Entrance until the vessel is twenty-seven kilometres out to sea. Will tugs escort tankers from Kitimat to the open sea? The nearest Coast Guard is in Prince Rupert, 135 km northwest of Gil Island.

There has been an informal moratorium on all oil tanker traffic off the coast of BC since 1972, renewed by the House of Commons in 2010 after the Harper government said there was no official moratorium. As for the Northern Gateway pipeline, all we have been told is that Enbridge, the pipeline’s owner, says it has a foolproof plan to manage all this. The area is one of the richest and most productive ecosystems on the planet, all based on the salmon. It is critical habitat for seventeen types of marine mammals, including the endangered blue, fin, right, sei and orca whales. Rivers critical for sixty percent of BC’s multi-million-dollar salmon catch run through the region.

The Canadian Environmental Assessment Act of 2012 applies to areas of federal jurisdiction: i) fish and fish habitat; ii) other aquatic species at risk; iii) migratory birds; iv) federal lands; v) effects that cross provincial or international boundaries; vi) effects that impact on Aboriginal peoples, such as their use of lands and resources for traditional purposes, and vii) changes to the environment that are directly linked to or necessarily incidental to any federal decisions about a project. Certainly there is federal jurisdiction re. the Northern Gateway pipeline in one or more of these areas, but “streamlining the process” is the key issue.

This government wants to end what it sees as past use of the environmental impact review process to hold up approval of development projects indefinitely. The Mackenzie Valley pipeline is an example they always bring up. Proposed in 1973, Thomas Berger was selected to head the inquiry in 1974. The final round of public hearings was in Inuvik NWT in April, 2010, and the project was approved by regulators in December, 2010. From a January, 2011 CBC News Business column, “Imperial Oil has until December 31, 2013, to make a final decision on whether to proceed with the pipeline at all, although it has asked the National Energy Board for three more years to decide. Should the company decide by 2013 to go ahead, construction would start in 2014 and production would start in 2018.” From 1974 to the regulatory decision in 2010 took thirty-eight years. Under the new regulations, the screening process has to begin within forty-five days and after that strict timelines for completion apply. There is a requirement to complete the actual assessment within 365 days, or twenty-four months if referred to a review panel, though these times can be extended up to three months by the Minister, or longer by order of Cabinet.

Public participation has been reduced, and is limited to any “interested party.” This includes those determined by the relevant authority to be “directly affected” by the project or to have relevant information or expertise. The rhetoric on this issue has been frightening, preventing any real discussion of what the development versus environment balance should be. According to Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver, environmental and other “radical groups” are trying to block trade and undermine Canada’s economy. “Their goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth. No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydro-electric dams.” He says the groups “threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda,” stack the hearings with people to delay or kill “good projects,” attract “jet-setting” celebrities and use funding from “foreign special interest groups.” To this, David Suzuki responded mildly: “Environmentalists want to ‘live within our means,’ ‘save some for tomorrow,’ think about the ‘legacy we leave for our children.’ [This] strikes me as a pretty conservative approach.”

According to CBC News April 17, 2012, Environmental groups and opposition parties insist that the government is merely giving big energy companies carte blanche by dismantling the checks and balances that protect the environment. “After slashing funding to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, they’re now saddling it with the obligation to do more complex reviews, faster, with fewer resources,” said NDP environment critic Megan Leslie. Green Party Leader and MP Elizabeth May said the moves go farther than what industry stakeholders were asking for: “This kind of savaging of the environmental assessment process is more about speeding the development even more than the industry needs,” May told CBC News Network.

Presumably provinces can still do their own reviews (environment and energy are provincial jurisdiction) and if BC did one on the Northern Gateway and the decision was negative, it’s hard to see how the federal government could push it through. In any case BC’s decision-making structure under its Environmental Assessment Act (and that of all provinces under their respective environmental assessment legislation) may take on increased prominence given the ability to exempt projects from the current Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, 2012 by substituting the federal environmental assessment process with a provincial one. If some aboriginal groups hold to a negative stance, and the BC government (perhaps a new NDP government) objects as well, it is not likely that the project will go forward, no matter how much the Harper government wants it to.

This year two “omnibus bills” were pushed through without debate, including a) a re-write of the Fisheries Act which has always been used to protect fish habitat (fresh waters with any fish in them – now only listed fish species are covered – popular sport fish and commercial fish); and b) the Boundary Waters Act removing federal environmental protection from all but explicitly named waters. Fortunately the lower Great Lakes have to be covered, so Lake Ontario and its bays are still protected. Isn’t it odd that the environmental sentiments of the Americans may now protect the Canadian environment, where it used to be American Great Lakes environmentalists who gave thanks to the Canadians for their environmentalism.

During this year there has been a gutting of Environment Canada and Fisheries & Oceans Canada. Scientists whose research might conclude environmental damage have been fired. (Not “de-funded” because some of them are internationally renowned and could attract funding, and the Harper government doesn’t want that.) Government scientists are now followed around at international conferences by “minders” who make sure they don’t speak out of turn. Submitted papers that don’t follow the industry line are excluded. I experienced that personally – a submitted paper critical of massive dispersants use, as happened in the Gulf of Mexico, was rejected for a regular session of an Environment Canada conference in Vancouver, as too political and not really a technical paper. However, many papers promoting the use of dispersants were presented by industry and government attendees. The UK newspaper The Guardian published an article by their US environment correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg about a revolt by Canada’s leading scientists against sweeping cuts to government research labs and the government’s pro-industry policies, saying that Harper is accused of pushing through a slew of policies weakening or abolishing environmental protections – with an aim of expanding development of natural resources such as the Alberta tar sands. (N.B.: This is not Canadian partisan opinion.)

It is a difficult time to be an environmental scientist in Canada. By that I mean a real one who has taught undergraduate and graduate students, researched and published, and supervised the research of others for half a century. I do not mean to denigrate environmental advocacy, because I do that too, especially after taking early retirement in 1999. I now do various things of that kind, including working with a group helping to preserve Lake Ontario’s Presqu’ile Bay; working with an NGO that monitors oil tanker traffic in Prince William Sound, Alaska; guiding locals and visitors around a mangrove wetland reserve in Singapore; and running environmental studies methods workshops for students and professionals in Canada and overseas (sixteen at last count). The knowledge and judgment of “environmentalists” is uneven, but it is bound to be because it grades from the environmentally concerned citizen (including hunters, fishers, campers, boaters, and aboriginals) to the very knowledgeable amateur scientist. I remember an old Icelandic fisherman on Lake Winnipeg who could pick up a whitefish and tell you what spawning stock it was from, thereby amazing a doctoral student who was developing a statistical method for determining that.

There are other talents besides academic training in environmental sciences. For example, David Suzuki is an excellent popularizer of environmental issues, even though his academic background was mostly in a now obsolete area of genetics. Some older visitors to the wetland reserve in Singapore know how all the plants were used: for food, as a poison for fishing, for musical instruments, for construction, for medicine. We can all learn environmental science basics, and we all should. Regardless of what we do for a living, we all live in an environment and ought to be committed to sustaining it and keeping it livable. »

[The Oct 7th Toronto Star article is at : www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1267961—why-northern-gateway-shouldn-t-go-near-great-bear-rainforest ]