Category: musing

Okay, this is ridiculous

I’ve been avoiding this blog because, as usual, the backlog of items to blog has gotten large enough to be seriously imposing, so i don’t want to even begin to deal with it. This is a far cry from my initial intention (and a blog’s raison d’etre) of just slamming stuff-of-interest up there off the top of my head, with little regard for its writerly quality.

So here i am breaking the ice again, with the intention of being a little freer and easier with the posting. I’ll back-date a few of them to a more appropriate day and month, so there won’t be a rush of items crammed into the next few days.

Hm, that sounded awkward — maybe i should edit it…. NOT!

Holy, holy, holy

I remember this like it happened this morning. I was 17. My girlfriend Dory and i were walking in a park near my home in Montreal’s west island. It was after supper, the fall evening warm and at that stage just before darkness. The boards of the hockey rinks had already been set up, waiting for the first freeze.

We were walking hand in hand, talking. There was a pause. I was usually more careful about what i said out loud, even back then. But for some reason i just blurted it out, a kind of intimate confession. “Sometimes,” i said, “i feel holy.” And it was true: At times a distinct feeling of holiness washed over me, more like a warm breeze than a blinding light, and i just knew without having to know that this was something called holiness and it was a gift, gratis, from the universe. It felt like something very special, but i never talked about it until i uttered that one sentence to Dory. I’ve never written about it since, until now.

Dory, bless her, laughed — not meanly — and poked fun at me. She thought i was trying to be either funny or pretentious. To my surprise i didn’t mind the laughter. I found i hadn’t really expected her, or anybody for that matter, to understand what was a private matter — private not because it’s personal, but because it’s incommunicable. Nothing more was said and the moment passed.

So too, gradually, did my spells of holiness. I didn’t feel that way at all after i entered university, or when i began to work and travel in the world. Too much else to do, i suppose: no time or importance for holiness.

But lately, that feeling has been visiting me again. Not often, and i don’t even remember exactly where or when. But i distinctly remember recognizing the feeling as the same one i was talking about back on the teenaged walk. And i’m glad it has begun to visit me again. Makes me think all this seeking is worthwhile.

.

Toss wisdom and holiness onto the garbage heap
and everyone will be better off.
—Lao-tzu

2 scary things

First let me say in my defence that i am not a complete jam tart. I have faced down the charging grizzly bear; i have been  dragged across the Mexican reef strapped to the boat; i have been trapped in the white-out atop the Arctic pingo. Yes, these were scary. But my experience in teeming T.O. this past few days has brought to light two things that scare me more than all of the above:

  1. PEOPLE. I walked around all yesterday afternoon with a mounting horror that i might have to actually talk to someone — this despite my observation that Toronto people unexpectedly seem to be among the friendliest urbanites i’ve met. In typical fashion, my fears were compounded by the beating-up-on-myself notion that i should not feel this way, that people are my species, that if i’m to get anywhere in life fearing people is not going to help. Which only made it worse, sweaty palms, tripping heart and all.
    Maybe i was simply overdosed on the social, what with all my recent travelling, and this was just the recoil. Maybe i needed alone time, with nowhere to go to get it. But i have also begun to suspect something else. I’ve been reading the blog of the eclectic and pathologically blunt Faye Kane for a couple of years. She’s a high-functioning autistic with almost no interpersonal skills, who can relate to people very well on-line but not at all in person — to the point where, up until a few months ago, she actually lived in a secret “cave” or shelter concealed somewhere in urban Virginia, surrounded by her computer equipment, microwave oven and MREs (military rations). Reading her descriptions of how it feels to be autistic has lead me to wonder whether i, too, might have a mild form of autism (Asperger’s syndrome, to be precise).
    It comes and goes, but at times just looking into somebody’s eyes, even a friend, can be a searing experience and a real challenge. I cannot understand how some people do it as a matter of course. Full, open communication is a challlenge, too — plodding, difficult and often futile.
    But then it passes, or mostly, and i can function with (relative) ease again in the world of people.
    I’m not going to pursue this self-diagnosis, for it wouldn’t lead to anything i can work with. Rather i’m taking the approach that i am as i am, despite my ideas or wishes to the contrary, and the best way forward is to accept that and work with it.
    .
  2. PRETTY WOMEN. My social paralysis is redoubled when it comes to these delectable creatures, because it gets entangled with the wild card of desire. Now that i’m firmly into middle age, a lovely young lass (even the less than lovely ones) have become something to covet — not the plebeian way one might covet a new mp3 player (which i do), but in some gut-deep, evolution-driven, ineradicable, save-me-from-looming-death sense. It’s not like a choice that can be dealt or bargained with (or fulfilled), it’s more like a glandular, animal hunger with no conceivable end to it. Sure, it’s controllable — the last thing i want is to become that cliché, the older man with the trophy wife. But dang, that doesn’t stop me from wanting it.
    And with that want comes a giving away of personal power. If a woman — any woman, probably — played her cards right, she’d have me on strings like a puppet. Worse yet, even if i did somehow resist her, i would think about it and regret it forever. Such is the lot of the insecure heterosexual male. I really hate this part of me, and so … i fear the pretty woman.

I’m ba-a-ack!

It’s been a month of intermittent Internet connection and scattered files and attention directed elsewhere, but i’m back in Winnipeg on mom’s computer and raring to go.

For you closet anarchists, here’s a zinger of a Sufi quote, courtesy of the inscrutable east and the kitchen wall of the Backpackers on Dundas hostel, downtown Toronto:

Nothing is true,
everything is permissible.

— Hasan bin Sabbah (creator of the “Garden of Earthly Delights,” if this source is to be believed)

According to the source, bin Sabbah was a schoolmate of poet Omar Khayyam (“a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou”) in Persia, back around 1055. Here’s an interesting sentence from the story at the “source” link above:

The students had to ascend through nine degrees, until finally they were taught the Ultimate Truth: that the world is created through actions, and beliefs are powerless distractions used to enslave the masses.

At the NAG

I am, for a moment, reeling, seated here in the main entrance of the NAG – the National Art Gallery. The sheer scale of the thing, the architectural panache, is impressive; but the tip-of-the-pyramid thought that boggles me revolves around the manifold foundation the building rests on. Not literally the concrete and stone, i mean, but the will and intent that went into the making of such a place. It’s a physical incarnation of the very thought, ART IS IMPORTANT — and by extension, of course, that a hundred corollary intangibles are also important, and you can see the evidence right here around you.

For this little boy from Ucluelet, it’s unthinkable. Back home there’s one and only one rationale for putting up a building of any stature greater than the single-family dwelling: it must be a factory of some sort, intended to extract revenue stream from a stream of fish or trees or, more recently, tourists. To build something, anything, in homage to or acknowledgment of human spirit or creativity or even as lowly a lofty principle as amusement … unthinkable! It’s not within the realm of small-town imagining, after you’ve spent a few years in the small town.

Which draws me, sitting here in this cathedral to visual art, into the funky musing that i have let all this go by, untapped, unknown. A whole world i should have waded into, but didn’t, because certain early doors weren’t open for me and, later, it just wasn’t there before me where i could see it as a possibility. So i spent my energies on other things, and now i feeling more than a twinge of regret.

Lights at the ends of tunnels, didn’t you once say, Jay-Lo? And their absence. Now i can’t help but think that my deliberate refusal to plan for the future in any coherent way has now left me stranded — that even a little foresight could have had me involved in something complex and glorious, rather than drifting in a bit of a homeless funk as i am. All that art in this big stone house built specifically for its display was made by people just like me, except they made an early decision that i did not.

.

AFTER SEEING THE 1930s EXHIBIT — I spent three hours in that special exhibit, rapt the whole time. Wow, what a dark decade, with its widespread recession, its rise of European fascism, its underpinning of World War II. No smiling faces on those 200-plus canvases, and none in the gallery either.

I kept wondering what those artists had been thinking, looking forward from those times, vis a vis us knowing with hindsight what the 1930s were ushering in: war, mass industrialization, the rape of the earth and the creeping subjugation of all living things upon it.

Afterward i went into Sketches cafeteria and ate beans on rice out on the patio and felt i was dead in heaven. It was a crystal day, the impeccable lawn rolled down to the Ottawa River, and the gothic Parliament Buildings rose like a castle across the water. (Pics when i get a chance.) Life was very, very good.